The Common Reader: Volume 2 - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099443678 ISBN 13: 9780099443674

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2003

Synopsis

'He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others'.
So Virginia Woolf described the 'common reader' for whom she wrote her second series of essays. Here she turns her brilliant eye on novels and poetry from John Donne to Christina Rossetti and Mary Wollstonecraft as well as many others. This is an informal, informative and witty celebration of our literary and social heritage by a writer of genius.

About this title

Review:

"Virginia Woolf was one of the great innovators of that decade of literary Modernism, the 1920s. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse showed how experimental writing could reshape our sense of ordinary life. Taking unremarkable materials - preparations for a genteel party, a day on a bourgeois family holiday - they trace the flow of associations and ideas that we call "consciousness"" (Guardian)

"Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of modernism in England and must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realisation of experimental achievements that have completely broken with tradition" (New York Times)

"Virginia Woolf was a great writer. Her voice is distinctive; her style is her own; her work is an active influence on other writers and a subtle influence on what we have come to expect from modern literature" (Jeanette Winterson)

From the Publisher:

‘He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge ro correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole – a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.’

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0099443678
• ISBN 13: 9780099443674
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352