Description
Book SynopsisVirginia Woolf was profoundly influenced by 'the Cambridge Apostles', the philosophical society which included much of male Bloomsbury. In this major study of Woolf's relationship to Bloomsbury and the aesthetic and philosophical developments of her time, Ann Banfield subjects that influence to a full treatment.
Trade Review'Ann Banfield has written a book of great size in every respect. Large in ambition, vast in research, commanding in its control of many difficult texts and many formidable arguments, it will become a major resource not only for Woolf scholarship, but for all those interested in modernist studies. This book is a major achievement.' Michael Levenson
'Ann Banfield's book is simply the finest interdisciplinary work in any language I am aware of comparing a writer with the philosophical domain of Modernism - it is a triumph of interdisciplinary method, offering exact, lucid comparisons, and presenting us with a picture of Woolf more tough-minded, rigorous, objective and sane than any previous picture.' Daniel Albright
'[The Phantom Table's] importance extends beyond its historical account of Woolf's aesthetics, for in tracing the dance of ideas among Woolf, Russell and Fry, Banfield offers a fresh perspective on both the problem of the subject in twentieth-century thought and art and Bloomsbury's philosophical and creative solutions …' Women's Review of Books
Table of ContentsList of illustrations; Preface; List of abbreviations; 1. Introduction: table talk; Part I. Subject and Object and the Nature of Reality: 2. The geometry in the sensible world: Russell's analysis of matter; 3. The world seen without a self: Woolf's analysis of matter; 4. Solus ipse, alone in the universe; 5. The dualism of death; Part II. Principia Aesthetica: 6. Fry's granite and rainbow: post-impressionism and impressionism; 7. How to describe the world seen without a self?; 8. The modern elegy; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
