Jacob's Room (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192836579 ISBN 13: 9780192836571

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 1999

Synopsis

Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob's life is traced from the time he is a small boy playing on the beach, through his years in Cambridge, then in artistic London, and finally making a trip to Greece, but this is no orthodox Bildungsroman. Jacob is presented in glimpses, in fragments, as Woolf breaks down traditional ways of representing character and experience. The novel's composition coincided with the consolidation of Woolf's interest in feminism, and she criticizes the privilege thoughtless smugness of patriarchy, `the other side', `the men in clubs and Cabinets'. Her stylistic innovations are conscious attempts to realize and develop women's writing and the novel dramatizes her interest in the ways both language and social environments shape differently the lives of men and women.

About this title

Review:

"amazing.... a new type of fiction has swum into view." -- E. M Forster

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
--Ron Rosenbaum, "The New York Observer"
"Small wonders."
--"Time Out London"
"""[F]irst-rate...astutely selected and attractively packaged...indisputably great works."
--Adam Begley, "The New York Observer"
"I've always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it's the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher's fine 'Art of the Novella' series."
--"The New Yorker"
"The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed--tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are."
--KQED (NPR San Francisco)
"Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... eleg

From the Publisher:

With introductions by Lawrence Norfolk and Elisabeth Bronfen

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0192836579
• ISBN 13: 9780192836571
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Flint Kate