1,432 research outputs found
Romantic Dialogues: Writing the Self in De Quincey and Woolf
No full textVirginia 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
Samuel Gholson Woolf papers, MSS.1578
No full textAbstract: A collection of personal correspondence and essays on various Southern topics by this Marengo County attorney and politician.Scope and Content Note: A collection of personal correspondence and essays on various Southern topics by this Marengo County attorney and politician.The essay titles include: Historical events and excerpts copied from Pickett's History of Alabama. The Alabamas: Muscogees, Desoto, Choctaws. Theories on Alcoholics. (Mr. Cheney) Archaeological Theories "Ball Play" Battle of Horse Shoe Buried Treasure The Canoe fight The Remarkable Canoe Fight The Choctaws Ponce de Leon Demopolis, Alabama (reconstruction days) Desoto Desoto in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi Theories on Evolution Franklin, Benjamin Frisco Railroad System Gaines, George S "Gaineswood" Hatred for New Englanders and Negroes Heflin, James Thomas Maubila The McGillivarys Miracles The Muscogees The Original Inhabitants of the Gulf States Our Flag Pushmataha Pushmataha Memorial Services The Torture of Prisoners Wildlife Conservation---Sumter County A Yaller Dog Democrat (Mr. Lincoln).Biographical/Historical Note: Samuel Gholson Woolf (20 May 1853 - September 1931) was born at Linden, Marengo County, Alabama. He was the son of Henry Ashley and Francis (Gholson) Woolf. Henry Ashley Woolf was a lawyer, legislator, and a member of the 1875 constitutional convention. His grandfather, James B. Woolf, moved to Alabama in 1818 and was one of the pioneer settlers of Marengo County. Samuel Gholson Woolf was educated in the common schools of Linden and attended Kentucky University from 1869-1871 but did not graduate. He began the practice of law at Linden in 1881. He served in the Alabama House of Representatives 1888-1889; 1900-1901; and 1907-1910 and in the Alabama Senate 1903-1906. He was elected probate judge of Marengo County in 1892.He was a democrat, a Missionary Baptist, and Mason, and a Knight of Pythias. He married twice: first to Fanny Pickering, 8 January 1879 and then to Mrs. Sadie Henley Lyon, 26 August 1896. He had three children by his first wife. Two of his children appear in the papers, Betty (Woolf) Thornton and John King Woolf
The dialectic of self and other in Montaigne, Proust and Woolf
No full textThis 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
Review of BENJAMIN DABBY. Women as public moralists in Britain: From the Bluestockings to Virginia Woolf
No full textA review of BENJAMIN DABBY. Women as Public Moralists in Britain: From the Bluestockings to Virginia Woolf. (Studies in History.) commissioned by the "American History Review"
Edward Woolf watercolor "An Indian of the Creek Nation Sketched from Nature at Mobile Alabama", MSS.3737
No full textAbstract: Watercolor sketch of a Creek Indian painted by Edward WoolfScope and Content Note: The collection consists of a watercolor sketch of a Creek Indian painted by Edward Woolf sometime after the Second Creek War.Biographical/Historical Note: Probably better known for his musical rather than artistic talents, Edward Woolf was an American musician, novelist, newspaper journalist, and artist. He was born in England in 1807 and immigrated to the United States, arriving in Mobile, Alabama, in 1837. There he met and married the sister-in-law of Israel I. Jones, a well-known Mobile resident. The couple had at least ten children: Benjamin Edwards, Michael A. Philip, Solomon, Albert Edward, Samuel, Allan, and three daughters.Over the course of his early career, Woolf was the conductor of orchestras in several cities, including Mobile, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Philadelphia. Finally settling in New York, he was the musical conductor of Burton's National Theatre for two years. After the Burton, he became conductor at the old Bowery Theatre, Barnum's Museum, and the Winter Garden.Woolf died in 1882
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
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
The Specious Present: background for my students (special author Virginia Woolf)
No full textThis 4 slides' presentation is supplementary material for my students who have opted for Virginia Woolf as their Masters' 'special author'. The presentation shows how James' the specious moment and Husserl's the rough now constitute the matrix of modernist literature, especially the fiction of Virginia Woolf. From St. Augustine to Husserl there is a continuum which has to be understood for engaging with the novels of Virginia Woolf
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