- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise
- “The Play’s The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A multimedia Exploration of Woolf’s Work in the Late 1930s and Her Vision of Prehistory.
- Report to the Memoir Club
- “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”
- Contradictions in Autobiography
- “But something betwixt and between”
- “Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
- Woolf’s Un/Folding(s)
- Woolf’s Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>
- “When the lights of health go down”
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Lacanian <i>Orlando</i>
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and <i>Flush</i>
- From Spaniel Club to An<i>i</i>Malous Society
- Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press<sup>1</sup>
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, sort of
- “Come buy, come buy”
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
- “A Brief Note in the Margin”
- “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “<i>Patron au Dedans</i>.”
- Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction
- Do Not Feed the birds
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf
- Duncan Grant
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
Figures of Contradiction
Figures of Contradiction
Virginia Woolf’s Rhetoric of Genres
- Chapter:
- (p.271) Figures of Contradiction
- Source:
- Contradictory Woolf
- Author(s):
Sara Sullam
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
This chapter explores Virginia Woolf's contradictory relationship with poetry, poets, and poetic forms and their role in Woolf's literary achievement. As a writer, Woolf tried to realize a blend between prose and poetry; as a critic, she dedicated several essays to her understanding of literary genres; and the Hogarth Lectures on Literature series stands as a further confirmation of her interest in the notions of genres and subgenres. The chapter then considers Woolf's use of rhetoric and its tropes to tackle the contradiction between prose and poetry, as well as her elaboration of a “rhetorical” notion of these two genres. Drawing on Northrop Frye's notion of “generic criticism,” it suggests that Woolf reaches a rhetorical understanding of genres where distinctions between prose and poetry can never be settled.
Keywords: poetry, poets, poetic forms, prose, essays, literary genre, rhetoric, Northrop Frye, generic criticism
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- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise
- “The Play’s The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A multimedia Exploration of Woolf’s Work in the Late 1930s and Her Vision of Prehistory.
- Report to the Memoir Club
- “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”
- Contradictions in Autobiography
- “But something betwixt and between”
- “Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
- Woolf’s Un/Folding(s)
- Woolf’s Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>
- “When the lights of health go down”
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Lacanian <i>Orlando</i>
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and <i>Flush</i>
- From Spaniel Club to An<i>i</i>Malous Society
- Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press<sup>1</sup>
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, sort of
- “Come buy, come buy”
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
- “A Brief Note in the Margin”
- “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “<i>Patron au Dedans</i>.”
- Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction
- Do Not Feed the birds
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf
- Duncan Grant
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
