Night and Day (1919) has been neglected by both readers and critics, especially if the reception of the novel is compared to that of other Woolfian writings. Despite recent revaluations of Woolf’s ...less canonical works, it has continuously been read as a second-rate novel. Marriage is the object of the heroines’ concern and the demanding principle of the novel’s structure. One is even more surprised perhaps that the novel features very infrequently in Woolf’s feminist criticism, the seminal work by Rachel Bowlby for example referring to Night and Day only in passing (Bowlby). And yet, Night and Day is the only novel in which the main character is involved in the Suffragette movement, despite the fact that Woolf’s own contribution to the movement is well-known and could have been expected to represent a more significant bulk in her fiction. If some of the critics’ reservations have been re-discussed recently, such as the place of the Great War (Briggs; Pelan), all critics seem to agree that the structure of the novel, if not its material, is traditional, disappointing, and ultimately not feminist enough. So what is it that resists feminism in Woolf’s novel and why is exception construed as negative rather than positive? This paper argues that Woolf’s novel exposes contradictions that are not judged feminist because they do not reflect a solid political engagement in which the heroines would be regarded as spokeswomen for the cause. However, these contradictions are very much feminist if feminism is understood as a question, instead of being a solution, posed to the possibility for women to be involved in some collective action, and if feminism lies in finding a way of defining woman outside the patriarchal norms. This reverberates back to the question of the inclusion of Woolf in the tradition of realist writers, and women’s writing.
Published to coincide with the Fourth United Nations Environmental Assembly, UN Environment's sixth Global Environment Outlook calls on decision makers to take bold and urgent action to address ...pressing environmental issues in order to protect the planet and human health. By bringing together hundreds of scientists, peer reviewers and collaborating institutions and partners, the GEO reports build on sound scientific knowledge to provide governments, local authorities, businesses and individual citizens with the information needed to guide societies to a truly sustainable world by 2050. GEO-6 outlines the current state of the environment, illustrates possible future environmental trends and analyses the effectiveness of policies. This flagship report shows how governments can put us on the path to a truly sustainable future - emphasising that urgent and inclusive action is needed to achieve a healthy planet with healthy people. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
In Virginia Woolf’s Good Housekeeping Essays, published by Routledge in their ‘Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace’ collection in 2019, Christine Reynier decides to take a series of six texts ...published by Woolf in the 1930s very seriously. It is very likely that few people apart from Woolf scholars will have heard of these essays, let alone read them, published in a second-rate magazine dedicated to fashion. Bringing them to our attention in a monograph enables the author to literally ...
Modernist Exceptions Boileau, Nicolas Pierre; Estrade, Charlotte
Miranda,
10/2021, Letnik:
23
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Modernism’s seminal “Make it New” has long acclaimed exceptionalism as part of the artistic movement’s reaction(s) to previous modes of thinking, writing and producing art. Indeed, modernism’s wish ...to renew literature, to experiment with language and to construct itself against previous modes of thinking and writing has enabled writers and artists to rethink the artistic, social and cultural codes or rules of the beginning of the 20th century, either openly, or in a more covert fashion. The g...
Les numéros doubles ont été très rares dans l’histoire de la revue. Pourquoi un tel sujet et dans ces années-là en particulier ? Nicolas Boileau (NB) : Je venais d’être recruté à l’Université de ...Provence (2010) quand Sylvie Mathé, alors rédactrice-en-chef de la revue, m’a proposé de coordonner un numéro d’e-Rea. Je connaissais la revue puisque j’y avais publié, avant la soutenance de ma thèse, un article. C’était une occasion formidable de pouvoir diriger un travail collectif et de proposer u...
In the context of the #metoo movement, some have expressed a long-running fear that feminism and the cause of women’s rights may enhance the opposition between men and women instead of bridging the ...gap between them, and create division instead of harmony. Martine Monacelli’s collection of texts written by men in favour of women’s rights could hardly have come at a better time to redefine the contours of the extent of men’s political engagement throughout the 20th century for women’s rights. T...
Plath’s work has often been described as an auto/biographical account of her death wish, and for some, her 1963 suicide was the evidence confirming her obsession for the morbid. The overwhelming ...presence of grief and mourning in her life has also been said to adumbrate the tone of most of her poems. Yet, very little has been done on the question of “autothanatography,” even if indeed Plath’s works seem to be far more concerned about death than life. Autothanatography suggests that there is a form of autobiographical writing that is less interested in the author’s past life than in the future/ upcoming death of the subject. Following in the footsteps of French psychoanalytical theory on Melancholia, this paper seeks to observe one of the blind spots of Plath’s critical literature, that is the real presence of death in language, causing subjects to be impossible to grasp and locate. Plath’s autobiographical writings were not means to fight off death, but to account for its looming presence in her writing as well as in her life. Thereby, Plath’s responsibility regarding her obsessional writing of death will be toned down, and the poems will be shown to bear the stigmas of the linguistic death that Plath reveals.
Modernist writers are often considered to have moved away from ambivalent or even negative representations of the city – which Victorian writers had depicted as the antithesis to the Eden-like ...countryside – and shifted towards a celebration of city life. While Mrs Dalloway is celebrated for its city scenes, casual allusions to conversations ‘among the vegetables’ reveal an often overlooked subtext. For Woolf and for Cusk, the garden functions as a contained space through which to work through problematic emotions and achieve at least temporary reconciliation between the past and present. Rather than working within polarised conceptions of a paradise lost or regained, both authors experiment with the idea of a fragmented paradise that can be pieced together in sudden moments of self-realisation. The cultivated space of a domestic garden brings into focus the perception of being ‘walled-in’ (MD, 64) by emotional perceptions of past experiences. Self-consciousness that struggles to be articulated is realised with sudden clarity in heightened ‘moments of being’. Virginia Woolf and Rachel Cusk thus experiment with the trope of the garden in order to explore the depths of the self, beyond the urban spaces that have been so central in their writings.
A Life’s Work, Cusk’s first memoir, in which she recounts her experience of motherhood, remains Cusk’s most controversial work. She tries to grasp the feeling of estrangement she experienced when she ...gave birth and the way bonding with her daughters was a slow process rather than an instantaneous event. What critics have tended to focus on is what I would call the thematic reading of this text – the sociological and cultural debate that it opens up about the representation of what motherhood is –, these discourses which Cusk attacks. However, they have failed to address the literary implication of Cusk’s appropriation of memoir writing, which, because it is defined by something which is impossible – at attempt at capturing the reality of an experience which is idealised, imaged and partly beyond words – gives way to creative solutions that undermine preconceived ideas about both the feelings motherhood should engender and the form any account of that experience should take. Written from a Lacanian perspective, this article addresses the scandalous nature of a creative memoir on motherhood.
Janet Frame’s fiction has always remained on the margins of the establishment: the author was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize several times, unsuccessfully, and after critical studies flourished in ...the 1980s and 1990s, her works seem to have gradually sunk into oblivion, were it not for the passion of a few isolated scholars. The decision to put her first collection of short stories, The Lagoon and Other Stories, published in 1951, on the syllabus of the highly prestigious and competitive agr...
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