Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form - Softcover

Emma Sutton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1474401430 ISBN 13: 9781474401432

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2015

Synopsis

This study is a groundbreaking investigation into the formative influence of music on Virginia Woolf's writing. In this unique study Emma Sutton discusses all of Woolf's novels as well as selected essays and short fiction, offering detailed commentaries on Woolf's numerous allusions to classical repertoire and to composers including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Sutton explores Woolf's interest in the contested relationship between politics and music, placing her work in a matrix of ideas about music and national identity, class, anti Semitism, pacifism, sexuality and gender. The study also considers the formal influence of music - from fugue to Romantic opera - on Woolf's prose and narrative techniques. The analysis of music's role in Woolf's aesthetics and fiction is contextualized in accounts of her musical education, activities as a listener, and friendships with musicians; and the study outlines the relationship between her 'musicalized' work and that of contemporaries including Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Mansfield and Eliot. It analysis of music, national identity and war in The Voyage Out, Jacobs Room and Mrs Dalloway. It offers a close reading of Wagner's influence on the plot and narrative techniques of The Voyage Out. It analysis of music and philo and anti Semitism in The Years. It offers innovative reading of the 'fugal' structure of Mrs Dalloway.

About this title

About the Author

Emma Sutton is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

From the Back Cover

*AUTHOR-APPROVED* 'Jean Rhys's persistent "strangeness" continues to unsettle the theoretical categories used to interpret her work and our own social structures. These new essays by leading Rhys scholars offer fascinating insights into Rhys's oeuvre and its influence on twenty-first century understandings of global modernism, ecocriticism, affect studies, and posthumanist theory. These perspectives, by Rhys and her critics, are essential for these new times.' Judith Raiskin, Associate Professor at the Women's and Gender Studies Department, University of Oregon Presents new critical perspectives on Jean Rhys in relation to modernism, postcolonialism, and theories of affect Jean Rhys (18901979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. She has played a major figure in debates attempting to establish the parameters of postcolonial and particularly Caribbean studies, and although she has long been seen as a modernist writer, she has also been marginalized as one who is not quite in, yet not quite out, either. The 10 newly commissioned essays and introduction collected in this volume demonstrate Jean Rhys's centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of different critical discourses, and includes a path-breaking section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent 'affective turn' in the social sciences and humanities. As this collection shows, strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhys's portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble easy conceptualisations and critical categories. Erica L. Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at Pace University in New York. She is the author of Caribbean Ghostwriting (2009) and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell'Oro (2003), and is the co-editor with Patricia Moran of The Female Face of Shame (2013). Patricia Moran is the author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf; Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma; and co-editor of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in 19th and 20th-Century Women's Writing and The Female Face of Shame. Formerly Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, she is now Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick. Cover image: Detail from Brassai's photograph of Rue Quincampoix. 1930-1932. (c) ESTATE BRASSAÏ -RMN Cover design: [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com ISBN 978-1-4744-0219-4 Barcode

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1474401430
• ISBN 13: 9781474401432
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184