Virginia Woolf's Essays: Sketching the Past - Hardcover

Gualtieri, E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333749316 ISBN 13: 9780333749319

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Synopsis

Why Virginia Woolf's essays? In this wide-ranging study, Elena Gualtieri gives compelling reasons for reading Woolf's essays as the traces of a never-realised historical work that would have covered the whole panorama of English literature. Following tenaciously the multiple directions taken by Woolf's non-fiction, Gualtieri reveals the deep roots of the difficulties that besieged Woolf in the search for a form of writing that would accommodate her tangential vision of literary history. She shows how in the non-fiction Woolf moves between essays and sketches as the two poles within which her historical project comes to be defined, the essay as the embodiment of the modernist fragment, the sketch as a way of recovering the past through narrative form. In so doing, Gualtieri also outlines a powerful argument about the relationship between the verbal, the visual and memory in modernism that has implications which go beyond the limits of Woolf studies.

About this title

Review:

Highly recommended. Choice

Synopsis:

Although marginal and often neglected genres, the sketch and the essay represented for Virginia Woolf the two forms of writing through which she articulated her understanding of the workings of literary history. This study analyzes the intersection between essays and sketches in Woolf's non-fiction as part of an argument about the scopes and models of feminist criticism, its understanding of the historical process and its position in the panorama of 20th-century intellectual history.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0333749316
• ISBN 13: 9780333749319
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 185