Virginia Woolf in context / edited by Bryony Randall, Jane Goldman.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

As a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context - whether historical, cultural, or theoretical - is to be understood in relation to her work and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualised today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender and class and the bearings of colonialism, empire and war.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

While the study of historicism in the works of modernist author Virginia Woolf is not new, this anthology is a valuable addition to the scholarship on Woolf. Randall and Goldman (both, Univ. of Glasgow, UK) assemble in 38 chapters a collection of critical essays by Woolfian scholars who examine the author's writings in counterpoint to what was happening in her day in economics, art, race, empire, gender, and nature. David Bradshaw's essay, "Woolf's London, London's Woolf," for example, revisits from a new perspective the earlier analysis by Susan Merrill Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: the Sexual Politics of the City (CH, Nov'85). Michael H. Whitworth, in the first chapter, articulates the volume's critical enterprise by saying that "Historicists might respond that the text never exists 'in itself,' that the words in the text exist in a web of associations that can be clarified only by reference to extra-textual material." An essay by Sonita Sarker on theories of postcolonialism illustrates how intertextuality in Woolf relates to contemporary national narratives. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels. D. L. Spanfelner Broome Community College