Search results for ""author julia briggs""

The pleasure and excitement of exploring Virginia Woolf's writings is at the heart of this book by a highly respected Woolf critic and biographer. 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 - from a series of highly imaginative and unexpected angles. Individual essays analyse Woolf's neglected second novel, Night and Day and investigate her links with other writers (Byron, Shakespeare), her ambivalent attitudes to 'Englishness' and to censorship, her fascination with transitional places and moments, with the flow of time (and its relative nature), her concern with visions and revision and with printing and the writing process as a whole. We watch Woolf as she typesets an extraordinarily complex high modernist poem (Hope Mirrlees's 'Paris'), and as she revises her novels so that their structures become formally - and even numerologically - significant. A final essay examines the differences between Woolf's texts as they were first published in England and America, and the further changes she occasionally made after publication, changes that her editors have been slow to acknowledge. Julia Briggs brings to these discussions an extensive knowledge of Woolf both as a scholar and as an editor. She records her findings and observations in a lively, graceful and approachable style that will entice readers to delve further and more meaningfully into Woolf's work. Features * Addresses a wide range of familiar and less familiar texts, including Woolf's short stories. * Opens up difficult texts in an inviting style. * Covers aspects of Woolf's work that have been consistently neglected or have never been considered before.

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'Woolf's pivotal novel ... the writer feels her way into becoming the giantess she would be' Paris ReviewVirginia Woolf's delicate second novel is both a love story and a social comedy, yet it also subtly undermines these traditions, questioning a woman's role and the very nature of experience. Its protagonist, Katharine Hilbery, is beautiful and privileged but uncertain of her future. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William, and her dangerous attraction to the lower-class Ralph. As she tries to decide, the lives of two other women - women's rights activist Mary Datchet and Katharine's mother, struggling with the weight of history - impinge on hers with unexpected and intriguing consequences. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Julia Briggs

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'Language is his power. His characters are precisely the words they speak' A. S. Byatt A young man is condemned to death for breaking a law forbidding sex outside marriage. When his sister pleads with the Lord Angelo to save him, he offers her a bargain - her brother's life in exchange for her virginity. One of Shakespeare's most enigmatic plays, Measure for Measure is a morally complex drama of intricate moves and countermoves that explores falsehood, justice and humanity's best and basest instincts.Used and Recommended by the National TheatreGeneral Editor Stanley WellsEdited by J. M. NosworthyIntroduction by Julia Briggs

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