Virginia Woolf's rich and imaginative use of language was partly a result of her keen interest in foreign literatures and languages - mainly Greek and French, but also Russian, German and Italian. As ...a translator she naturally addressed herself both to contemporary standards of translation within the university, but also to readers like herself. In Three Guineas she ranged herself among German scholars who used Antigone to critique European politics of the 1930s. Orlando outwits the censors with a strategy that focuses on Proust's untranslatable word. The Waves and The Years show her looking ahead to the problems of postcolonial society, where translation crosses borders. In this in-depth study of Woolf and European languages and literatures, Emily Dalgarno opens up a rewarding new way of reading her prose.
In this unique study Emma Sutton discusses all of Woolf’s novels as well as selected essays and short fiction, offering detailed commentaries on Woolf’s numerous allusions to classical repertoire and ...to composers including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Sutton explores Woolf’s interest in the contested relationship between politics and music, placing her work in a matrix of ideas about music and national identity, class, anti-Semitism, pacifism, sexuality and gender. The study also considers the formal influence of music – from fugue to Romantic opera – on Woolf’s prose and narrative techniques. The analysis of music’s role in Woolf’s aesthetics and fiction is contextualized in accounts of her musical education, activities as a listener, and friendships with musicians; and the study outlines the relationship between her ‘musicalized’ work and that of contemporaries including Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Mansfield and Eliot.
Reflecting the modernist fascination with science, Virginia Woolf's representations of nature are informed by a wide-ranging interest in contemporary developments in the life sciences. Christina Alt ...analyses Woolf's responses to disciplines ranging from taxonomy and the new biology of the laboratory to ethology and ecology and illustrates how Woolf drew on the methods and objectives of the contemporary life sciences to describe her own literary experiments. Through the examination of Woolf's engagement with shifting approaches to the study of nature, this work covers new ground in Woolf studies and makes an important contribution to the understanding of modernist exchanges between literature and science.
Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere relates Woolf's literary reviews and essays to early twentieth-century debates about the value of 'highbrow' culture, the methods of ...instruction in universities and adult education, and the importance of an educated public for the realization of democratic goals. By focusing on Woolf's theories and practice of reading, Melba Cuddy-Keane refutes assumptions about Woolf's modernist elitism, revealing instead a writer who was pedagogically oriented, publicly engaged and committed to the ideal of classless intellectuals working together in reciprocal exchange. Woolf emerges as a stimulating theorist of the unconscious, of dialogic reading, of historicist criticism and of value judgments, while her theoretically informed but accessible prose challenges us to reflect on academic writing today. Combining a wealth of historical detail with a penetrating analysis of Woolf's essays, this 2003 study will alter our views of Woolf, of modernism and of intellectual work.
This is the first book to explore Virginia Woolf's preoccupation with the literary past and its profound impact on the content and structure of her novels.
A study that unveils the revelatory potential of the house museum to inform and enrich our understanding of the lived past of its former inhabitants. It focuses on the emotionally textured interiors ...of Charleston and Monk's House, the literary/artistic house museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, seeking out traces of their shared biography.
Rachel Bowlby's acclaimed book on Virginia Woolf now appears with five new essays which look at Woolf in a number of new frames - as a woman essayist; as a city writer and critic of modern culture; ...and as a writer on love. Rachel Bowlby shows, with inimitable critical panache, how it is that Woolf's writing, in its many forms and fashions, continues to provide rich matter for thinking about the histories and futures of women, writing and culture.
Narratology is concerned with the study of narratives; but surprisingly it does not usually distinguish between original and translated texts. This lack of distinction is regrettable. In recent years ...the visibility of translations and translators has become a widely discussed topic in Translation Studies; yet the issue of translating a novel's point of view has remained relatively unexplored. It seems crucial to ask how far a translator's choices affect the novel's point of view, and whether characters or narrators come across similarly in originals and translations. This book addresses exactly these questions. It proposes a method by which it becomes possible to investigate how the point of view of a work of fiction is created in an original and adapted in translation. It shows that there are potential problems involved in the translation of linguistic features that constitute point of view (deixis, modality, transitivity and free indirect discourse) and that this has an impact on the way works are translated. Traditionally, comparative analysis of originals and their translations have relied on manual examinations; this book demonstrates that corpus-based tools can greatly facilitate and sharpen the process of comparison. The method is demonstrated using Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), and their French translations.
Criticism of Woolf is often polarised into viewing her work as either fundamentally progressive or reactionary. In this 2007 book, Steve Ellis argues that her commitment to anxiety about modernity ...coexists with a nostalgia and respect for aspects of Victorian culture threatened by radical social change. Ellis tracks Woolf's response to the Victorian era through her fiction and other writings, arguing that Woolf can be seen as more 'Post-Victorian' than 'modernist'. He explains how Woolf's emphasis on continuity and reconciliation related to twentieth-century debates about Victorian values, and he analyses her response to the First World War as the major threat to that continuity. This detailed and original investigation of the range of Woolf's writing attends to questions of cultural and political history and fictional structure, imagery and diction. It proposes a fresh reading of Woolf's thinking about the relationships between the past, present and future.
