Browse

This book presents thirty-seven chapters which present the text of papers selected from approximately 200 papers given at the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by the University of Glasgow. The theme of contradiction in Woolf's writing, including her use of the word “but,” is widely explored in relation to auto/biography, art, philosophy, cognitive science, sexuality, animality, class, mathematics, translation, annotation, poetry, and war.

This volume of essays surveys gastronomy across global literary modernisms. Modernists explore public and domestic spaces where food and drink are prepared and served, as much as they create them in the modernist imagination through narrative, language, verse, and style. Modernism as a cultural and artistic movement also highlights the historical politics of food and eating. As the chapters in Gastro-Modernism reveal, critical trends in food studies alert us to many social concerns that emerge in the modernist period because of expanding food literacy and culture. The result is that food production, consumption, and scarcity are abiding themes in modernist literature and culture, reflecting tensions amidst colonial, agricultural, and industrial settings. This timely volume ultimately shows how global literary modernisms engage with food culture known as gastronomy to express anxieties about modernity as much as to celebrate the excesses modern lifestyles produce.

Recounting his 1897-98 Klondike Gold Rush experience Jack London stated: “It was in the Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine.” This study explores how London’s Northland odyssey - along with an insatiable intellectual curiosity, a hardscrabble youth in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an acute craving for social justice - launched the literary career of one of America’s most dynamic 20th-century writers. The major Northland works - including The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and “To Build a Fire”- are considered in connection with the motifs of literary Naturalism, as well as in relation to complicated issues involving imperialism, race, and gender. London’s key subjects—the frontier, the struggle for survival, and economic mobility—are examined in conjunction with how he developed the underlying themes of his work to engage and challenge the social, political, and philosophical revolutions of his era that were initiated by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and others.

This book suggests that James Joyce, like Yeats and his fellow Revivalists, was attracted to the west of Ireland as a place of authenticity and freedom, and shows how his acute historical sensibility is reflected in Dubliners, posing new questions about one of the most enduring collections of short stories ever written. The answers provided are a fusion of history and literary criticism, using close readings that balance techniques of realism and symbolism. The result is a study that shines light on Dubliners and Joyce's later masterpieces.

The late-Victorian era has been extensively researched as a period of Gothic literature, and this study seeks to build upon this body of work by connecting the content of such studies to the early decades of the twentieth century. Beginning with the quintessentially urban Gothic space of fin de siècle London, as represented in classic texts such as Dracula and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the study proceeds to ask how the themes and energies which emerge in this moment evolve throughout the early twentieth century. In the ghost stories of authors like M.R. James, the Edwardian era witnesses an uncanny return to the rural English landscape, in which modernity encounters the re-emergence of suppressed fears and forces. After World War One, London again experiences a renewal of Gothic themes, with figures such as D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot representing the city as a stricken and desolate space, haunted by the trauma and ghosts of the recent conflict. That legacy of violence and loss is also evident in rural representations of place in the 1920s and 1930s, along with a renewed interest in supernaturalism and paganism found in authors like Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mary Butts. Ultimately, this study argues, this period of dramatic social and cultural change is shadowed by a corresponding evolution in Gothic literary representation, whether that is expressed through modernist experimentation or more conventional narrative forms.

Anita Brookner was a best-selling women’s writer, Booker Prize winner and an historian of French Romantic art. However she is best known for writing boring, outdated books about lonely, single women. This book offers a queer rereading of Brookner by demonstrating the performative Romanticism of her novels to narrate multiple historical forms of homoerotic desire. It draws on diverse nineteenth-century intertexts from Charles Baudelaire to Henry James, Renée Vivien to Freud to establish a cross-historical and temporal methodology that emphasises figures of anachronism, the lesbian, the backwards turn and the woman writer. Delineating sets of narrative behaviours, tropes and rhetorical devices between Brookner’s Romantic predecessors and her own novels, the book produces a cast of Romantic personae comprising the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller as hermeneutic figures for rereading Brookner. It then stages the performance of these personae along the specified narrative forms and back through six Brookner novels to reveal queer stories about their characters and plotlines. This new interpretation offers ways to think about Brookner’s contemporary female heroines as hybrid variations of (generally male) nineteenth-century artist archetypes. As a result it simultaneously critiques the heterosexual and temporal misreading that has characterised Brookner’s early reception.

This book details the work of one of the most extraordinary publishing enterprises in history. Censor–baiting, provocative, simultaneous publisher of the literary elite and of ‘dirty books’, Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press published Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce among others. At the same time Kahane subsidised his literary endeavours with cheap erotica and trash fiction from long–forgotten eccentrics such as New York Daily News' Rome correspondent and self–styled ‘Marco Polo of Sex’ N. Reynolds Packard. Kahane's business model was simple: if a book was banned in the UK and US it could be profitably published in Paris. Here, the author has pulled together the incendiary story of Obelisk, including biographies of Kahane and his major and minor authors, and a bibliography of Obelisk books.

This project provides critical readings of individual sections of The Cantos of Ezra Pound written by prominent Pound scholars who combine critical insight with useful information about sources and contexts. Focused around a generous selection of the most important Cantos, this book provides a vital introduction for new readers of The Cantos and a valuable resource for the more experienced.

This book examines a renewed focus upon rural landscapes, culture and traditions among English interwar modernist writers, specifically D.H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf. All of these figures have a profound sense of attachment to place, but an equally powerful desire to engage with the upheavals of interwar modernity and to participate in contemporary literary experimentation. This dialectic between tradition and change is analogous to a literal geographical shuttling between rural and metropolitan environments, and all four writers display imagery and literary techniques which reflect those experiences. The first chapter emphasises ambivalence in the work of Lawrence, and argues that this is inextricably bound up with his intimate, empathic understanding of place. Chapter Two argues that Powys has a similarly ambivalent relationship with modernity, but defuses this through a fantastical, nostalgic lens; he develops a sense of the landscape as layered, expressing a kind of temporal cosmopolitanism. Chapter Three notes a vexed relationship with modernity and place in the work of Butts; like Powys she attempts to resolve this through a re-enchantment of place, promoting a cosmopolitan reimagining of rural England. Finally, Chapter Four posits Woolf as a figure able to manage tensions between urban and rural, modern and traditional, reflected in the development of an ‘urban pastoral’ form. In all four writers there is evidence that modernism’s expansion of perspectives can be fruitfully extended to those of place and nonhuman animals; the central stress in the conclusion is on the need to incorporate such perspectives.

This book brings Johnson more sharply into focus by casting him amongst an unfamiliar milieu and company; likewise, it is hoped that by bringing Johnson to bear on the various authors and topics gathered, it manages to foreground some aspects of Modernism and its practitioners that would otherwise remain elusively hidden. If it is unlikely that the phrase “Modernity Johnson” will eclipse such better-known appellations as “Dictionary Johnson” and “the Rambler,” this volume suggests that it urges a rethinking of both Johnson and Modernism in ways that are at once compelling, illuminating, and critically productive.

This volume situates Virginia Woolf in relation to the past. A range of articles from leading Woolf scholars demonstrate that despite her fame as a leading Modernist novelist, Woolf also drew on a rich cultural, literal and familiar heritage in her writing. Prominent themes include education and mentoring, heritage spaces, literary and cultural pasts, and Woolf’s exploration of queer pasts. It also assesses her own literary and biographical legacy, including recent works of biofiction, and the reception of Woolf’s work by writers in France, Poland, Romania and North America.

This book presents chapters which present discussions delivered at the 23rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. The theme of the conference, the concept of “common(wealth),” addresses geographical, political, and imaginary spaces in which different readers and readings vie for primacy of place. The chapters reflect upon “common(wealth)” as a constructed entity, one that necessarily embodies tensions between the communal and individual, traditional culture and emergent forms, indigenous people and colonial powers, and literary insiders and outsiders.

This book is a compilation of thirty-one chapters which contain discussions presented at the twentieth annual international conference on Virginia Woolf. This volume explores Woolf's complex engagement with the natural world, an engagement that was as political as it was aesthetic. The diversity of topics within this collection—ecofeminism, the nature of time, the nature of the self, nature and sporting, botany, climate, and landscape, just to name a few—fosters a deeper understanding of the nature of nature in Woolf's works.

Virginia Woolf and the World of Books examines Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press as a key intervention in modernist and women's writing and mark its importance to independent publishing, bookselling, and print culture at large. The research in this volume coincides with the centenary of the founding of Hogarth Press in 1917, thus making a timely addition to scholarship on the Woolfs and print culture.

Virginia Woolf Writing the World addresses such themes as the creation of worlds through literary writing, Woolf’s reception as a world writer, world wars, and natural worlds in Woolf’s writings. The collection represents the theme of internationalism in Woolf’s work, but its global appeal is likewise reflected in the diverse range of contributors from around the world. The volume is divided into four themed sections: “War and Peace”; “World Writer(s),” which reads the Woolfs in a global context; “Animal and Natural Worlds,” which brings recent developments in ecocriticism and post-humanist studies to analysis of Woolf ’s writing; and “Writing and Worldmaking,” which addresses various aspects of genre, style, and composition. In addition to a myriad of historical perspectives, the book also brings us back to international and cultural conflicts in our own day, reminding us why Woolf still matters today.

This book provides a synopsis and analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In her close reading, Molly Hoff collects the literary fragments scattered in the novel and gathers them into a discussion of style, narrative and intertextual references. The author supplements her breakdown of individual lines and words in the novel with her own knowledge of the city of London and the idioms used by its residents, therefore providing a useful context on place and language. Hoff also draws on poetic convention from Classical and modern literature, including Greek myth and Alexandrian poetry, to supplement her discussion of the novel’s use of characterisation, recurring motifs and imagery. Hoff’s annotations are organised according to the novel’s twelve unnumbered ‘section’ breaks, indicated by Woolf with vertical spacing.

This book contains chapters selected from the nearly 200 papers delivered at the nineteenth annual international conference on Virginia Woolf. The volume includes an introduction, the conference keynote addresses, and twenty-five other chapters organized around six presiding themes: navigating London; spatial perceptions and the cityscape; regarding others; the literary public sphere; border crossings, and liminal landscapes; and teaching Woolf, Woolf teaching. The book also includes a special session of the conference, a round-table conversation on Woolf's legacy in and out of the academy. Beyond the volume's focus on urban issues, many of the chapters address the ethical and political implications of Woolf's work, a move that suggests new insights into Woolf as a “real world” social critic.