Virginia Woolf in Context

Description

As 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.

Bryony Randall is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is author of Modernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life (2007) and has published articles on Gertrude Stein, New Woman short stories, Stevie Smith, Dorothy Richardson and H. D. She is co-editor of the upcoming Cambridge University Press edition of Virginia Woolf's short fiction. Jane Goldman is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow and a General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. She has written several books on Virginia Woolf, including The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (2006) and The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (1998). She is editor of Woolf's To the Lighthouse for Cambridge University Press and co-editor of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents.

'... Virginia Woolf in Context is a useful addition to the flourishing field of Woolf studies. It covers an array of contexts, brings together numerous internationally renowned scholars, and highlights developing critical trends. Not only will it be of great assistance to those encountering Woolf's work for the first time, but [it] will also service well-versed scholars. The 'Literature in Context' series published by Cambridge University Press is fast becoming the criterion against which other collections are judged and, along with 'The Cambridge Companion' series, will prove to be an indispensable resource.' Jeremy Diaper, Virginia Woolf Bulletin 'Similar to other books in Cambridge University Press's Literature in Context series, this collection places a particular writer within the various contexts that inform his or her work ... this collection provides the contexts necessary to understand Woolf's more difficult works without prescribing the view one should take of these works - and Woolf herself.' Molly Youngkin, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920