Description
Book SynopsisThe pleasure and excitement of exploring Virginia Woolf's writings is at the heart of this book as Julia Briggs reconsiders Woolf's work - from some of her earliest fictional experiments to her late short story, 'The Symbol', and from the most to the least familiar of her novels.
Trade ReviewEach essay casts a fresh eye over well-scrutinised texts. ! Blurred images ! were suddenly rendered sharp and clean by seeing them through Brigg's lens. ! This is academic writing of the highest order. Virginia Woolf Bulletin All of the essays are intriguing, providing rare, inspired and provocative readings of Woolf's work embedded in strong historical and biographical context. -- Vara Neverow, Southern Connecticut State University and President of the International Virginia Woolf Society Julia Brigg's wide-ranging collection of essays provides readers with multiple avenues by which to explore Virginia Woolf's canon ... This is a book that presents, as Woolf explains in "Modern Fiction" of life itself, "question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over." -- Andrea Adolph, Kent State University Stark Campus Woolf Studies Annual Each essay casts a fresh eye over well-scrutinised texts. ! Blurred images ! were suddenly rendered sharp and clean by seeing them through Brigg's lens. ! This is academic writing of the highest order. All of the essays are intriguing, providing rare, inspired and provocative readings of Woolf's work embedded in strong historical and biographical context. Julia Brigg's wide-ranging collection of essays provides readers with multiple avenues by which to explore Virginia Woolf's canon ... This is a book that presents, as Woolf explains in "Modern Fiction" of life itself, "question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over."
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 'Such Absences!'; 1. VW Reads Shakespeare, or Her Silence on Master William; 2. 'The Proper Writing of Lives': Biography versus Fiction in the early short stories; 3. Night and Day: the Marriage of Dreams and Realities; 4. Reading People, Reading Texts: 'Byron and Mrs Briggs'; 5. Modernism's Lost Hope: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the printing of Paris; 6. The Search for Form (i): Fry, Formalism and Fiction; 7. The Search for Form (ii): Woolf and the Numbers of Time; 8. 'This Moment I Stand On': Woolf and the Spaces in Time; 9. 'Like a Shell on a Sandhill': the World of Things in To the Lighthouse; 10. Constantinople: Woolf at the Crossroads of the Imagination; 11. The Conversation Behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable; 12. 'Cut deep... and scored thick...': Woolf's Later Short Stories; 13. 'Almost Ashamed of England Being so English': Woolf and Englishness; 14. Between the Texts: Woolf's Acts of Revision.
