1,180 research outputs found
Romantic Dialogues: Writing the Self in De Quincey and Woolf
Get PDFVirginia Woolf has been recognised as a pioneering modernist writer creating a new literary voice. It is not unusual to discover in Woolf’s writings the aesthetic and literary traces of those past traditions and influences which have been woven into her modern narratives. One significant, but often overlooked, influence comes from the Romantic period and the essayist, Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey’s stylish essays inspire Woolf’s art. Both writers’ fascination with representing the self (and their devotion to creating a literary thinking about, and narrative of, the subject) indicates a shared affinity between these two writers in spite of important cultural, historical, and social differences between them. My treatment of the self in De Quincey and Woolf is aware of the aesthetic and literary affinities between them and those cultural and historical differences that divide them. Tracing important connections between these two important writers sheds light on the larger concerns and patterns of both the literary scenes of Romanticism and Modernism.
Six chapters in three sections focus on three main aspects of the self central to De Quincey and Woolf—the art of literature, the representation of time and the question of autobiographical writing. Chapter One and Two investigate De Quincey’s literature of power and Woolf’s art of fiction to examine the relationship between literary representation and the self. Chapter Three and Four discuss issues of time and self in De Quincey and Woolf. The final two chapters contend that De Quincey’s and Woolf’s reflections on literary representation, and time as a philosophical problem are embodied in their writings of the self across their respective literary careers. A project of this kind is alert to and enriches a recent burgeoning critical interest from Romanticists and Modernists alike in the exchanges, interchanges, bequests, and legacies of Romanticism to Modernism
Virginia Woolf in Context
No full textAs a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context – whether historical, cultural, or theoretical – is to be understood in relation to her work, and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualised today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political, and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender, and class, and the bearings of colonialism, empire, and war. A valuable critical touchstone for researchers, the volume will also complement graduate scholarship in English literature, literary theory, context studies, and modernism and postcolonial studies
Gesamtkunstwerk as an aesthetic pre-occupation in the novels of Virginia Woolf.
No full textPhDThis thesis aims to show that Wagner's theories of Gesamtkunstwerk were a
pre-occupation in Woolf's work throughout her career. The introduction
explores Gesamtkunstwerk theory, tracing its development in theories
concerning the combination of art forms, I go on to show how Woolf uses the
Voyage Out to explore what the modern novel can learn from musical arts, while
Jacob's Room adds painting to music as a significant field of interest for
Woolf Mrs Dalloway adds to the complexity of combination, for I will
demonstrate that in this novel a Nietzschean interpretation of Wagner's ideas
found in The Birth of Tragedy is detectable, allowing Woolf to compare the
motivation of more extreme avant-garde groups. The chapter on To the
Lighthouse will consider Woolf's evaluation of her parents' cultural
background and the influence of Roger Fry on her developing aesthetic theory
of combination. I shall argue that understanding of these areas allows Woolf to
begin to experiment with her own form of Gesamtkunstwerk. It is in The
Waves that the connection with Wagner is most obvious. Here, I believe
Woolf shifts the focus of attention from Wagnerian theories of
Gesamtkunstwerk to the Modernists' development of such ideas,
demonstrating her knowledge of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Looking closely
at the 1915 Raid Scene in The Years, I intend to show that Woolf's thinking on
the concept of combination is equally radical in this novel which is often
considered to be more conventional. I will go on to suggest that Between the
Acts, widely acknowledged to indicate a crisis in Woolf's confidence in
Modernism, marks a turning point in her thinking about the possibilities of
combining the arts to achieve Gesamtkunstwerk. I will argue that in this piece
Woolf provides us with all the elements used to create unity in the previous
works and yet they are never wholly united. Woolf, however, is not suggesting
that Gesamtkunstwerk is an impossibility, she is rather indicating that the
audience lacks the ability to provide the stage for such a piece to exist
The dialectic of self and other in Montaigne, Proust and Woolf
Get PDFThis thesis investigates the construction of identity in relation to an other. It considers three
writers who, working at moments when the nature of selfhood was an urgent issue, conduct
profound and original enquiries into the question of self- construction, and seeks both to
reassess their contributions to this debate, and, in bringing their preoccupations and methods
to bear upon each other, to open up new ways of approaching and reading their work.
Considering a range of socio-cultural and religious forms of otherness -- the cannibal, the
witch, the Jew, the aristocrat, the woman, the divine -- it embraces material from a number of
important modem critical fields, and suggests how these topics might be combined to offer a
coherent statement about the enduring issue of s elf- fashioning.
The thesis seeks to map out a trajectory of decreasing investment in external communities,
and an increasing perception of the self as a source and agent in the construction of identity.
Looking in turn at the work of Montaigne, Proust and Woolf, it argues that where the Essais
construct complex orders which appropriate the other to reinforce the identity of the self,
Proust and Woolf increasingly, although gradually, and by no means always successfully,
attempt to negotiate a less precisely- engaged relationship between other and self, and to
assign the other a less constitutive role in the realization and expression of identity. The
thesis also considers more briefly contexts in which this trajectory is reversed. To the extent
that they examine modernist subjectivity, Proust and Woolf articulate an anxiety about the
separation of self and world which leads to an attempted recuperation of the integrated orders
depicted by Montaigne
Autobiography, chocolate creams and letterpress printing
No full textIn response to the call for printed works on paper to recognise the creative contribution made by the Woolfs and the Hogarth Press to printing, art, literature and book culture as part of the 27th annual international conference Virginia Woolf and the World of Books (June 29-July 3 2017), at the University of Reading, UK, this article describes the collaborative process between an academic and artist in response to the theme author as publisher . The first part describes the steps from idea development, design, locating and accessing a working printing press in Ireland; the second part, based on direct observation, describes the technical aspects of typesetting and letterpress printing, design in relation to the artistic process in adding an image to the letterpress text as well as providing a brief history of Ponc Press. The third part reflects on the possible meanings of chocolate creams to Leonard Woolf, why they book-end his autobiography Beginning Again and how the work of visualizing chocolate creams, re-representing autobiography, touches on Leonard s Jewish and English identity
The Woolf report A decade of change?
No full textAuthor is The Rt. Hon. Lord Woolf, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. Lecture delivered at the Law Society, London, on 31 January 2001SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:6617.05887(2001) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Change in Northumbria : was Aldfrith of Northumbria's reign a period of innovation or did it merely reflect the development of processes already underway in the late seventh century?
No full textThis thesis looks at a period of Northumbrian history when the king was a part Irish, Iona trained scholar. Some have suggested that Aldfrith was assisted to the kingship by the northern victors of the battle of Nechtansmere. It examines processes in the late seventh century to try to identify changes that might have happened during the reign of this king.
The study begins with a wide overview of previous research to establish a basis from which to look for processes and change and also examines the sources available to us, written and archaeological. It then looks at the kingdoms to the north and west and at Aldfrith and the period of his reign. The suggestion is made that Aldfrith acted, with the Church, to cult saints that were Northumbrian and Romanist, as opposed to other options that might have been available. It proposes that the Northumbrians rejected opportunities to develop links with the north and west that may have been open to them. The following chapters then examine processes underway in Northumbria in three general areas; in the use of power, in society, and in the economy.
It concludes that although many processes continued as before, these sped up and in certain areas such as the production of coins, and the consequential development of trade, it was a period of innovation. There is no evidence of a focus to the north and west during Aldfrith’s reign and this has implications for how Aldfrith got to the throne, suggesting that it was with the support of the Northumbrian elite and not through the military strength of the Dál Riata or the Picts. The evidence is that Northumbria increasingly looked south for its influences and is prepared to absorb and implement processes and approaches from southern England, Gaul and Rome
Neither Scotland nor England : Middle Britain, c.850–1150
No full textIn and around the 870s, Britain was transformed dramatically by the campaigns and settlements of the Great Army and its allies. Some pre-existing political communities suffered less than others, and in hindsight the process helped Scotland and England achieve their later positions. By the twelfth century, the rulers of these countries had partitioned the former kingdom of Northumbria.
This thesis is about what happened in the intervening period, the fate of Northumbria’s political structures, and how the settlement that defined Britain for the remainder of the Middle Ages came about. Modern reconstructions of the era have tended to be limited in scope and based on unreliable post-1100 sources. The aim is to use contemporary material to overcome such limitations, and reach positive conclusions that will make more sense of the evidence and make the region easier to understand for a wider audience, particularly in regard to its shadowy polities and ecclesiastical structures.
After an overview of the most important evidence, two chapters will review Northumbria’s alleged dissolution, testing existing historiographic beliefs (based largely on Anglo-Norman-era evidence) about the fate of the monarchy, political community, and episcopate. The impact and nature of ‘Southenglish’ hegemony on the region’s political communities will be the focus of the fourth chapter, while the fifth will look at evidence for the expansion of Scottish political power. The sixth chapter will try to draw positive conclusions about the episcopate, leaving the final chapter to look in more detail at the institutions that produced the final settlement
Bodily Territories: Lust, Landscape and the Struggle for Female Space in Woolf's The Voyage Out and Atwood's Surfacing
No full textIn her lengthy critical essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf inquires into the absence of the female genius in the literary canon. As she mourns this lack of feminine representation on her own bookshelves—“looking about the shelves for books that were not there”—Woolf questions the opposition between what she refers to as the lyrically “suggestive” female sentence, and the dominant, subject driven, “I” of the male sentence (AROO, 45, 98). Woolf carves out a creative space for feminine narrative and focuses primarily on the landscape that is dominated by the “I”. This “I” representing both the masculine epic narrative and a metaphorical phallus, obliterates the surrounding landscape of the novel. This landscape signifies the role of women in literature; ever present, yet, not at the forefront, or well developed. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf encounters a masculine text with palpable disdain. As her hypothetical villain “Mr. A.” composes a novel that serves as an example of the metaphorical dominant signifier “I”, Woolf, with desperation, attempts to see beyond the “I” and to read the landscape behind: “But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter “I”. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure” (100). Because it represents the women that remain hidden in an opaque shroud of historical non representation, this landscape becomes territory for the modern woman to reclaim. This landscape, not merely a literary space, is metaphorically linked to the territorial claiming of the female body due to patriarchal domination. The female body manifests itself throughout literature as a blank canvass onto which future generations are inscribed. This body, much like the body of a literary text, insures immortality to the author. It is in Woolf‟s own writing that the landscape is at the forefront and it is the female body that she seeks to reclaim in her first novel The Voyage Out. Woolf unknowingly passed this torch, this desire to explore literary and bodily territory, to Canadian Author Margaret Atwood. It is in her second novel, Surfacing, that Atwood presents a thematically similar take on territorial struggles in the framework of modern marriage. Both women, though separated by decades of supposed feminist progress, reveal that marriage remains a game of territorial occupation.Graduate English Association, English Department, Georgia State UniversityPresented at Graduate English Association New Voices Conference 2007, pp. 1-9
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