The Unknown Virginia Woolf - Softcover

Poole, Roger

9780521484022: The Unknown Virginia Woolf

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521484022 ISBN 13: 9780521484022

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1996

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Since its first publication in 1978, Roger Poole's The Unknown Virginia Woolf has achieved recognition as one of the classic studies of Woolf's life and work. Poole revised the conventional view of Woolf as 'mad' by treating her breakdown as socially intelligible. The theme of madness was reconceived in order to provide an intellectual biography that traced Woolf's fear and resentment to her childhood and adolescence. Poole uses the phenomenological concept of embodiment to address the concealed intentionality that lies behind apparently deviant behaviour. He shows how Woolf's challenge to accepted conventions of communication, in both her life and work, is an appeal for meaning. Long considered radical and iconoclastic, this book now occupies a central place in Woolf, gender, and modernist studies. This new edition includes a specially written preface evaluating recent developments in Woolf studies, literary theory and contemporary feminist criticism.

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Review

'... in the best sense of an over-used word, it is challenging; it makes us aware of the dangers of a canon being too easily established in biographical interpretation, and of the closeness of relation between the novels and the life. It is especially welcomed for its verve, its overriding sense of engagement, its self-evident 'need to be written'.' The Times Higher Education Supplement

'Poole's analysis of Virginia's marriage to Leonard Woolf is deadly frank and honest - and, I feel, absolutely accurate. As is the rest of this remarkable work. The Unknown Virginia Woolf is a brilliantly argued interpretation of the life of a genius, much maligned by her closest associates and friends.' Eric Hiscock, The Bookseller

Book Description

The Unknown Virginia Woolf is now recognised as one of the classic studies of Woolf's life and work. Roger Poole revises the conventional view of Woolf's madness to reveal hidden areas of textual and biographical meaning. This new edition contains a specially written preface evaluating contemporary developments in Woolf and feminist studies.

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