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1
Vézina, Anne-Marie. "La femme dans l'oeuvre de Colette et de Virginia Woolf /." Thesis, McGill University, 1986. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=65916.
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Polychronakos, Helen. "Reflecting Woolf : Virginia Woolf's feminist politics and modernist aesthetics." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=30201.
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No study of Virginia Woolf can do justice to the complexity of her life and work without taking into account the numerous contradictions present in her thought. Though Woolf is recognized as a revolutionary contributor to the development of modernism, it is also important to remember that she was born in 1882 and that the nineteenth century also left its mark on her. The first chapter will examine this double sensibility. The second chapter will trace the development of Woolf's modernist aesthetic. She was obviously rebelling against the realism valued by her Victorian and Edwardian predecessors when she conceived of a literary style capable of abstracting from purely formal elements a more "profound reality" than that captured by objective and representational descriptions. Despite this revolutionary tendency, she constructs a hierarchy of "realities" that is somewhat elitist in its mysticism and runs counter to the revolutionary feminist and Marxist thought evident in so much of her work. The last chapter will examine the contradictions that riddle Woolf's feminist writings.
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Brûlé, Michel 1964. "Partie critique: Réflexion sur "L'art du roman" de Virginia Woolf ;Partie création: ... Dent pour dent." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=59534.
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In the first segment of the critical part of my thesis, my thought lays on "L'art du roman" of Virginia Woolf. In the second part, while recognizing certain qualities in the critical work of the English writer, I take side in favor of the literary theories of Celine and Sartre. In the last part of this text, I am exposing my views according to which the Quebec's literature would have greater advantage of being more "engage". The creating part of my thesis takes shape as a "roman engage". The story is about a disillusioned nationalist Quebecer, graduate and unemployed, who decides to change his personality to be like an English Canadian to better start his career in Toronto. Though all the sustained efforts he made to become Canadian, he realizes that he is first and above Quebecer. In ... Dent pour dent, the political message plays a fundamental role, but the esthetical aspects like humor, repetition and rythm are in the first place.
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Stewart, Janice 1966. "Violent femmes : identification and the autobiographical works of Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and Emily Carr." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36712.
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The questions posed and examined in Violent Femmes take their genesis from psychoanalytic arguments which contend that identity is not a stable monadic thing but rather a continuing process of engagement and negotiation between the self and others. Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Christopher Bollas, amongst others, have noted the temporary, coalitional, and provisional nature of the ways in which identity is apprehended and experienced. This thesis expands upon such a theoretical framework of identity formation to specifically question the ways in which the formation and maturation of an artistic identity may, in part, be predicated upon the psychological capacity to enact violence within the realm of the imaginary. Violent Femmes examines the complex relationship between psychological violence and artistic identity as that relationship is recorded in the autobiographical writings of Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and Emily Carr.This project traces the written vestiges of Woolfs, Hall's, and Carr's individual internalised struggles to formulate an artistic identity in specific relationship with an already established 'model' of artistic creativity and identity. Woolfs, Hall's, and Carr's struggles to claim a personal artistic identity, in some ways from their individual model of the artist, are waged within the minds of the authors themselves. However, the violence enacted within their imaginations---the violence perpetrated against the models of the artist---is thrust into the external world, not only within the writings of these three women, but also by the ways in which each author resolves or fails to resolve her own violent conflict with her imaginary model of the artist.
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Wright, Elizabeth Helena. "Virginia Woolf and the dramatic imagination." Thesis, St Andrews, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/510.
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Sautter, Sabine. "Irrationality and the development of subjectivity in major novels by William Faulkner, Hermann Broch, and Virginia Woolf." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0017/NQ55379.pdf.
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Dale-Jones, Barbara. "An examination of dreams and visions in the novels of Virginia Woolf." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002266.
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This thesis explores the importance of the visionary experience in five novels by Virginia Woolf. In her fiction, Woolf portrays the phenomenal world as constantly changing and she uses the cycles of nature and the passing of time as a terrifying backdrop against which the mutability and transience of human life are set. Faced with the inevitability of change and the fact of mortality, the individual seeks moments of permanence. These stand in opposition to flux and lead to the experience of a visionary intensity. Woolf's presentation of time as a qualitative phenomenon and her stress on the importance of memory as a function which allows for the intermingling of past and present make possible the narrative rendering of moments which contradict perpetual change and the rigours of sequential time. Moments of stillness 'occur in the midst of and in spite of process and allow for individual contact with an experience that defies the relentless progression of time. Necessary for this experience is not only memory but also the imagination, a faculty which has the power to perceive patterns of harmony in the midst of the chaos that characterises the phenomenal realm. Fundamental to Woolf's writing, however, is the acknowledgement that visions are fleeting, as are the glimpses of meaning that emerge from them. Therefore, while several of her novels describe the artistic effort to create a structured order as a defense against change, Woolf uses the artist's struggle as a metaphor for the difficulties attached to describing the enigma that is life. None of her artist figures is able to formulate a construction that either sums up life or provides a permanence of vision. This study presents a chronological examination of the novels in order to demonstrate that the changing forms of Woolf's fiction trace the evolution of a style that accurately portrays both the workings of the human mind and the insubstantial and fragmentary nature of life. The chronology also reveals that her novels develop in terms of their presentations of the visionary experience. Woolf's final novel incorporates into its central vision the paradoxical fact of the permanence of time's progression and acknowledges that, beyond the individually mutable life, is a continuum that links pre-history to the future. This notion, which is explored in part in the earlier novels, but developed completely in Between the Acts, suggests that consolation can be found in the greater cycles of existence despite the fact of individual mortality.
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Sandison, Jennifer Madden. "Reflections of self : the mirror image in the work of Virginia Woolf." Thesis, McGill University, 1988. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=64108.
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Griffin, Lisa Myfanwy. "'Imperfect adumbrations' : boys, men, and masculinities in the work of Virginia Woolf." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11907.
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This thesis will suggest how Woolf scholarship's rich exploration of Virginia Woolf's representations of girls, women and femininities may be complemented by more systematic feminist study of constructs of masculinities, as they appear in her work. Elaborating the concept of the ‘private brother', the figure of a form of maleness that the daughters of educated men ‘have reason to respect', but that Three Guineas' narrator stipulates is ‘sunk' by men's exposure to society and replaced by the ‘monstrous male', my thesis will focus particularly on the representations of boys, men and masculinities in To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts and Woolf's biography Roger Fry, though I will additionally use material from Woolf's essays, diaries and letters, as well as from Mrs Dalloway, The Years and The Pargiters. The first section of my thesis will supplement feminist critiques of the education received by upper-middle-class English boys in Woolf's texts by exploring her representations of young male (inter)subjectivities in the process of being ‘sunk.' In the second section, I will complicate the narrative trajectories often indicated for these characters in Woolf criticism by proposing that Woolf understood this sinking process as always incomplete: I will argue that Woolf's adult male characters, even her patriarchs, professors and otherwise educated men, vacillate continually between stances that might be characterised as monstrous maleness and private brotherliness–in both ‘public' and intimate settings–as one of the preconditions of social existence.
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De, Santa Jessica E. "Accounting for taste : the poetics of food and flavour in Virginia Woolf’s novels." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11825.
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This thesis argues that tasting appears as an act of creative empathy and of knowledge acquisition in Virginia Woolf's writing. First contextualising my discussion within Woolf's own reading of the aesthetic and literary history of ‘taste', I then use Cixous' essay ‘Extreme Fidelity' (renamed ‘The Author in Truth') as a theoretical entryway to passages from The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, A Room of One's Own, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Orlando which centralise the role of gustatory pleasure in creativity and epistemology. Cixous elaborates an oral, ‘poetic' and feminine ontology rooted in a receptivity to sensual pleasure, a concept that assists my reading of Woolf in several aspects. I suggest that in Woolf, both literal and figurative experiences of taste contribute to physical and psychic repletion, consequently eliciting empathy with the other (Cixous' term). This empathy which originates in the body constitutes an epistemological source distinct from intellectual or emotional intelligences, but one equally integral to the creative process. I assert that empathy features in Woolf as an extension or enlargement of the imagination through which a subject incorporates knowledge of alterity, but without consuming the other - as in the act of tasting. This ideation differs from notions of empathy as an analogical mapping or projection of self onto other. I discuss the ways in which a ‘gustatory epistemology' informs Woolf's approach to her craft, shapes the interrelationships of her characters, and materialises stylistically in her development of a ‘poetic' prose language.
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Sriratana, Verita. ""Making room" for one's own : Virginia Woolf and technology of place." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3458.
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This thesis offers an analysis of selected works by Virginia Woolf through the theoretical framework of technology of place. The term “technology”, meaning both a finished product and an ongoing production process, a mode of concealment and unconcealment in Martin Heidegger's sense, is used as part of this thesis's argument that place can be understood through constant negotiations of concrete place perceived through the senses, a concept based on the Heideggerian notion of “earth”, and abstract place perceived in the imagination, a concept based on the Heideggerian notion of “world”. The term “technology of place”, coined by Irvin C. Schick in The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse (1999), is appropriated and re-interpreted as part of this thesis's adoption and adaptation of Woolf's notion of ideal biographical writing as an amalgamation of “granite” biographical facts and “rainbow” internal life. Woolf's granite and rainbow dichotomy is used as a foreground to this thesis's proposed theoretical framework, through which questions of space/place can be examined. My analysis of Flush (1933) demonstrates that place is a technology which can be taken at face value and, at the same time, appropriated to challenge the ideology of its construction. My analysis of Orlando (1928) demonstrates that Woolf's idea of utopia exemplifies the technological “coming together”, in Heidegger's term, of concrete social reality and abstract artistic fantasy. My analysis of The Years (1937) demonstrates that sense of place as well as sense of identity is ambivalent and constantly changing like the weather, reflecting place's Janus-faced function as both concealment and unconcealment. Lastly, my analysis of Woolf's selected essays and marginalia illustrates that writing can serve as a revolutionary “place-making” technology through which one can mentally “make room” for (re-)imagining the lives of “the obscure”, often placed in oblivion throughout the course of history.
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Yeung, Siu Yin. "Modernist fiction and self: representing women and solitude in selected works by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2015. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/180.
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Solitude and self have been common topics for discussion and scrutiny by philosophers, scholars and writers. However, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century, with women 's enlightenment, that one notices women writers ' interest in understanding their selves in moments of solitude. Women who were conscious of drastic social changes often examined their lives and explored their selves in solitude. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf represent women writers of their time who shared a common interest in portraying women's quests for self in solitude. The present study shows how the solitary state is a significant precondition for modern women to reflect on their lives or explore their selves at a time when society was undergoing drastic changes. A close study of Katherine Mansfield 's "Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding" (19 l 0), "Kezia and Tui" (1916), "Prelude" ( 1918), "At the Bay" ( 1922), and "All Serene!" (1923) shows that Mansfield always offers her women characters punitive consequences in the endings because of their compromise with their mundane conditions even though they have gained some sense of the self through contemplation and meditation. In the case of Virginia Woolf, she situates her women characters in isolation and contemplation, and often presents her women characters as active seekers of self through meditation and alienation. Autonomy, authenticity, and vision define these women's emerging self in such novels as Night and Day ( 1919), Orlando ( 1928), and To the Lighthouse ( 1927). The present study reveals Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf as two exemplary women writers who examine women in moments of solitude through the interplay of social and psychological reality. Solitude is a recurrent condition and theme in their fiction that is often presented in "contrapuntal" manner (Dunbar ix). The contrast between women 's public and performative existence and their private and unmasked self characterises the fiction of Mansfield and Woolf, allowing the two writers to examine patriarchal oppression of women's acquisition of self against the backdrop of modernity. Mansfield and Woolf's treatment of solitude is particularly important as it sheds light on their shared views and friendship. Solitude is treated as a critical state, a condition, a private space, an attitude, or a refuge from performativity for women in their texts. Yet they have adopted distinct writing strategies in dealing with the subject owing to their difference in experience and literary outlook. Mansfield creates heroines who are more practical and modest in their approach to the subject of self-construction. Woolf creates women characters who often resort consciously to solitude to challenge and reflect upon gender norms, gain a better sense of their selves, and deploy various means to attain self-realisation.
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Collett, Rachel Joan. "Turning back : continuity and difference in modernist and postmodernist reflexivity." Thesis, Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/4256.
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Thesis (MA VA (Visual Arts))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The primary function of paintings and novels in Western culture has historically been considered the depiction or description of reality. Over the course of the last century, however, the inherent reflexivity of both art and literature has become progressively more insistent and programmatic, in such a way as challenges the relationship between form and the world. A re-thinking of the role of representation is thus central to both modernism and postmodernism. This thesis is an investigation into the relationship between modern and postmodern reflexivity. Through the close examination of four artists who serve as case studies, I argue that literary and artistic modernism‟s emphasis on form and subjectivity, as well as the tendency of postmodern art and writing to flaunt its own status as rhetoric/fiction, are different facets of a continuous response to a rapidly changing world. Using the insights of post-structuralist theory, I suggest that whereas modernism‟s reflexive drive is directed towards truth and self-knowledge, postmodern reflexivity is centrally concerned with the elusive, continually shifting nature of meaning. What emerges in the light of the practice of individual artist and authors, however, is that the modern and postmodern reflexive modes are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but can co-exist, producing a vital and necessary tension.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Beskrywing en uitbeelding van die werklikheid word geskiedkundig as die kernfunksies van skilderye en die roman in die Westerse kultuur beskou. Gedurende die laaste eeu het die inherente refleksiwiteit van beide kuns en letterkunde toenemend meer programmaties en sistematies geword. Dit het geskied op „n wyse wat die verhouding tussen vorm en die wêreld uitdaag. „n Herbesinning van die rol van uitbeelding of representasie is gevolglik van sentrale belang vir beide modernisme en postmodernisme. Hierdie tesis is „n ondersoek na die verwantskap tussen moderne en postmoderne refleksiwiteit. Deur „n noukerige ondersoek van vier kunstenaars se werk, stel ek voor dat die letterkundige en artistieke klem van modernisme op vorm en subjektiwiteit, sowel as die gebruiklike kenmerk van retoriek/fiksie, verskillende aspekte is van „n voortdurende weerkaatsing op „n vinnig veranderende wêreld is. Deur die teoretiese perspektiewe van post-stukturalisme toe te pas, stel ek voor dat modernistiese refleksiwiteit neig na die waarheid en selfkennis, terwyl postmoderne refleksiwiteit fokus op die onbepaalde en veranderlike aard van betekenis. Nietemin, uit my kritiese beskouing van die kreatiewe praktyk van afsonderlike kunstenaars en skrywers blyk dit dat die modernistiese en postmodernistiese refleksiewe benaderinge nie noodwendig mekaar uitsluit nie, maar saam kan bestaan en „n dinamiese en noodsaaklike spanning skep.
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Donovan, Anna Gay. "Virginia Woolf : a language of looking." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.324071.
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The aim of this thesis is to trace a 'language of looking' in some of Virginia Woolfs texts. I have taken Woolfs short story entitled 'The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection' as a point of departure and principle theme. This story provides models for a serious questioning of the ways we look at women and how that looking deten»ines their representation. In turn that representation is shown to structure and inform our ways of looking. Each paragraph of the story is taken as a starting point for a chapter of the thesis. Thus, each of the ten paragraphs of the story becomes, as it were, the epigraph of the chapter that follows. Each chapter moves out from the specific problematics offered by 'The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection' to other works by Woolf, and beyond. My readings of 'The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection' show Woolf to be exploring different ways of getting to 'know' the Lady, to ascertain her 'truth'. The aptness and inadequacy of description, the giving of facts and the detail of imaginings, the insights of perception and the blindness of rhetoric, are all revealed as the story and the thesis unfold. The ways in which a woman can be regarded, spoken of, but never 'truly' represented, is examined. Each chapter focuses upon how, in consecutive paragraphs, Woolf attempts to create a convincing character that can be caught and turned to words. The very difficulties of representation are seen to be written into Woolfs text as the narrative moves from one speculative moment to another. In order to explore the issues raised in the short story I engage with other of Woolfs writings. Using close readings of her work, psychoanalytic concepts, critical writings, Surrealist thought and photographic model, I work to show just how vital are the 'signs' of looking in Woolf's texts.Finally the failures of language are realised as I look at how Woolfs awareness of the complexities and nuances of the visual demonstrates a negative, self-destructive impulse as well as a positive, life-enhancing moment of becoming. Woolfs search for the best words with which to portray the Lady of her story is echoed by my own struggle to find the right words with which to reveal the intricate network of 'looks' that adds yet another dimension to the enigmatic and challenging works of the Lady we know as Virginia Woolf.
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Richter, Yvonne. "A critic in her own right taking Virginia Woolf's literary criticism seriously /." unrestricted, 2009. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04162009-164658/.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2009.Title from file title page. Randy Malamud, committee chair; Paul Schmidt, Lee Anne Richardson, committee members. Description based on contents viewed Aug. 13, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p, 91-97).
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曾昭楹 and Chiu-ying Venus Tsang. "Temporality in modernist literature: Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2003. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B26822428.
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Camargo, Monica Hermini de. "Versões do feminino: Virginia Woolf e a estética feminista." Universidade de São Paulo, 2001. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8147/tde-03072002-231829/.
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Esta dissertação tem como objetivo analisar as condições e possibilidades do feminismo de Virginia Woolf à luz do momento sócio-econômico e cultural em que viveu e do qual foi um dos ícones. Por causa de sua formação e do panorama histórico da época, suas posições assumem um caráter extremamente ambíguo. Este estudo mostra que a autora oscila entre ser ícone de toda uma geração e outsider, romancista e crítica literária, intelectual e leitora comum, senhora das letras e feminista, crítica do gosto e proponente de uma nova estética literária, vitoriana esnobe e modernista. Tanto sua natureza criativa quanto os elementos propostos em sua estética literária resultam de sua visão de mundo e de sua relação ambígua com a realidade.The aim of this dissertation is to analyze the conditions and possibilities of Virginia Woolfs feminism in the light of the social, economical and cultural environment in which she lived and of which she became one of the icons. Because of her background and of the historical setting of her time, her positions take on an extremely ambiguous character. This study shows that the author bends from a whole generation icon to an outsider, from novelist to literary critic, from highbrow to common reader, from lady of letters to feminist, from woman of taste to proponent of a new literary aesthetics, from Victorian snob to modernist. Both her creative nature and the elements she suggests in her literary aesthetics result from her view of the world and from her ambiguous relationship with reality.
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Fajardo, Sônia Maria Costa. "Orlando, de Virginia Woolf: desconstruindo as fronteiras de gênero." Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), 2017. https://repositorio.ufjf.br/jspui/handle/ufjf/4221.
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Esta dissertação de mestrado busca refletir sobre a importância da interface entre os Estudos Literários e os Estudos de Gênero, a partir da análise de Orlando, uma biografia, de Virginia Woolf, cujo personagem principal, Orlando, desafia as fronteiras entre o masculino e o feminino, ao passar por uma transformação sexual, de forma natural. O enredo dessa biografia ficcional permite traçar pontos de interseção entre as considerações sobre androginia, não-linearidade, flexibilidade e mutabilidade dos sexos promovidas por Woolf. Para a análise da proposta inusitada de Woolf, que constrói a metamorfose de Orlando, foram utilizados os estudos de Um teto todo seu (2014), de Virginia Woolf, e A crítica feminista no território selvagem, de Elaine Showalter (1994). Para a realização da congruência de Orlando, uma biografia, com os Estudos de Gênero, tornou-se essencial a compreensão dos conceitos elaborados por Simone de Beauvoir, em O segundo sexo, v. 2: a experiência vivida, (1967); Joan Scott, em Gênero: uma categoria útil de análise histórica (1995) e Judith Butler, em Problemas de gênero: feminismo e subversão da identidade (2003). A flexibilidade e as variações de gênero suscitadas por Woolf contrapõem-se aos rígidos conceitos construídos para o masculino e para o feminino, assim como a característica inalterável da sexualidade. Em 1928, com Orlando, uma biografia, Virginia Woolf antecipou a questão de gênero, tão atual e pertinente na busca do respeito às liberdades e na extinção dos formatos preestabelecidos que insistem em determinar o comportamento mais intrínseco dos indivíduos.
This present Master's Thesis aims to reflect upon the importance of the correlation between Literary Studies and Gender Studies, based on the analysis of Orlando, a biography, by Virginia Woolf, in which the main character, Orlando, defies the borders between male and female, when transforming himself sexually, in a natural way. The plot of the fictional biography allows to trace intersection points concerning androgyny, non-linearity, flexibility and changeability of gender, created by Woolf. For the analysis of Woolf's unusual proposal, which constructs Orlando's metamorphosis, the following studies were used: A room of One's Own (2014), by Virginia Woolf, and Criticism and the Wilderness (1994), by Elaine Showalter. To accomplish the congruency of Orlando, a biography, with Gender Studies, it is essential to comprehend the concepts proposed by Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, v. 2: a living experience, (1967); Jon Scott, in Gender: a useful category of Historical Analysis (1995) and Judith Butler, in Gender Problems: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (2003). The flexibility and gender variations expressed by Woolf contrast with the strict concepts once built concerning male and female, as well as the unchangeable characteristic of the sexuality. In 1928, with Orlando, a biography, Virginia Woolf anticipated the gender issue, so recent and pertinent in the search for respect to the liberty and the extinction of the preestablished forms that insist on determining the most inherent behaviour of the individuals.
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Wood, Alice. "The development of Virginia Woolf's late cultural criticism, 1930-1941." Thesis, De Montfort University, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2086/4806.
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This thesis explores the development of Virginia Woolf’s late cultural criticism. While contemporary scholars commonly observe that Woolf shifted her intellectual focus from modernist fiction to cultural criticism in the 1930s, there has been little sustained examination of why and how Woolf’s late cultural criticism evolved during 1930-1941. This thesis aims to contribute just such an investigation to field. My approach here fuses a feminist-historicist approach with the methodology of genetic criticism (critique génétique), a French school of textual studies that traces the evolution of literary works through their compositional histories. Reading across published and unpublished texts in Woolf’s oeuvre, my genetic, feminist-historicist analysis of Woolf emphasises that her late cultural criticism developed from her early feminist politics and dissident aesthetic stance as well as in response to the tempestuous historical circumstances of 1930-1941. As a prelude to my investigation of Woolf’s late output, Chapter 1 traces the genesis of Woolf’s cultural criticism in her early biographical writings. Chapter 2 then scrutinises Woolf’s late turn to cultural criticism through six essays she produced for Good Housekeeping in 1931. Chapter 3 surveys the evolution of Woolf’s critique of patriarchy in Three Guineas (1938) through the voluminous pre-publication documents that link this innovative feminist-pacifist pamphlet to The Years (1937). Finally, Chapter 4 outlines how Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), fuses fiction with cultural criticism to debate art’s social role in times of national crisis. The close relationship between formal and political radicalism in Woolf’s late cultural criticism, I conclude, undermines the integrity of viewing Woolf’s oeuvre in two distinct phases –the modernist 1920s and the socially-engaged 1930s – and suggests the danger of using such labels in wider narratives of interwar literature. Woolf’s late cultural criticism, this thesis argues, developed from rather than rejected her earlier experimentalism.
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Hudson, Elaine C. "Writing the author : Sylvia Plath, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and the biographical novel." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2015. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/30403/.
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This thesis explores the effect produced when contemporary novelists write about fellow authors. Since the mid-1990s, the biographical novel, which fictionalises the lives of real-life historical authors, has become an increasingly popular literary genre in Britain and the United States. This contemporary exploration of authorial subjectivity, viewed here through the lens of life-writing, provides a reengagement with debates surrounding the crisis of the author-figure (exemplified by Roland Barthes), and the unreliability of biography as a discourse of subjectivity at the turn of the twenty-first century. Through its inherent self-reflexivity (with its exposure of both the author-biographer alongside the author-subject), I consider how the biographical novel succeeds in reconciling the author-figure with the literary text in new ways. While critical interest in the biographical novel has tended to focus on a limited number of texts, little attention has been paid to their status as an emergent sub-genre of life-writing. Through the exemplary figures of Sylvia Plath, Henry James and Virginia Woolf and their corresponding biographical novels, I draw together a core body of texts to demonstrate their unity as a literary form. With an emphasis upon the role of life-writing in the construction of authorial subjectivity, I consider how each of the three author-subjects have cultivated — and been cultivated by — particular recurrent motifs: firstly through their own texts (whether fictional or biographical), then as they become manifest once again in the writing of the contemporary biographical novelists. Modernist developments in biographical modes, particularly Woolf's revision of the relationship between the biographer and his or her subject, provide both context for the biographical novel, and a rich framework upon which to build contemporary forms of life-writing and authorial subjectivity. Taking these as a starting point through which to view the 'author question', my thesis reveals how the genre of the biographical novel offers a redefinition of both the author as a multiple, progressive and changing figure, and a highlighting how the reinterpretation of life-writing in fictional form both enhances and supports the future of biography and autobiography as an equally evolutionary form.
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Stalla, Heidi. "Life is in the manuscript : Virginia Woolf, historiography, and the 'mythical method'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:58e6f835-b776-4a87-bafd-f48525c11918.
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Virginia Woolf's writing is aesthetically complex, politically engaged, and remains relevant today - an astonishing achievement. This thesis begins by asking how and why this is the case, and thinks through Woolf's relationship to history as a means of suggesting some answers. References to the past abound in Woolf's fiction in the form of meaningful names, stories, myths, and national histories. I am especially interested in allusions that are not immediately obvious, but still work to convey something about human nature. These were sometimes inspired by artifacts in museums, or by articles in magazines or newspapers, or literature she owned, or borrowed, or was being written by her contemporaries - sources that a careful researcher can track down. Other references are more difficult to prove; for example, they may have come from travel experiences related by friends, or personal experiences not recorded in her diary. In this case we need to balance circumstantial evidence, common sense, and an understanding of the spirit and concerns of the age. In the first chapter I highlight Woolf's early interest in the tension between fact and fiction as it is expressed in her 1906 short story, "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn". The chapter serves as way of demonstrating my process. I point out the interplay between form, content, and autobiography that is in her other work. In short, a good deal of what is imagined may have been inspired by personal experience and real historical material. The next three chapters reveal new character types and source material for Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves - the novels in which Woolf worked out what I have called her "mythical method". I end by inviting scholars to reconsider tensions in her work such as fact and fiction, self and other, art and politics from a new angle: not only as thematic preoccupations but also as crucial to thinking of - to borrow from Gertrude Stein - composition as a form of explanation. Woolf's project in fiction was to figure out what modernism can and should do. Although it is not necessary for all readers to do the kind of research demonstrated here in order to understand the novels, having an awareness of this work is important. This new way of looking at how and why Woolf wrote both in and outside of time as part of the process of composition makes us think again about the reasons that we should care so much about "Mrs. Brown". It helps us appreciate that the project of conveying both the ephemeral and temporal qualities of human experience is what makes the study of literary modernism (and its current global, transnational forms) a dynamic, political, and expanding phenomenon today.
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Neves, Caroline Resende. "Virginia Woolf e o espaço autobiográfico em Os anos." Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), 2018. https://repositorio.ufjf.br/jspui/handle/ufjf/6784.
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O objetivo da presente dissertação é discutir os pontos de intersecção entre a vida da autora inglesa Virginia Woolf e sua obra ficcional Os anos, assinalando quais experiências foram utilizadas como fonte criativa no espaço autobiográfico ocupado pela obra citada. O livro que se configura como objeto de estudo narra a saga de uma família vitoriana que claramente se assemelha à própria família de Woolf, abrangendo o espaço de tempo de 1880 até os anos 1930, e dessa forma também abarcando as mudanças não só familiares, como também da sociedade inglesa. Com esse propósito, buscou-se inicialmente apresentar a biografia da escritora, seguido de um breve panorama da literatura de autoria feminina e da análise da produção crítica de Woolf, criando um paralelo em relação ao uso das experiências pessoais entre sua teoria e sua prática. Em um segundo momento, discute-se as teorias relacionadas à escrita de si, almejando encontrar uma que possa melhor definir a prática de escrita utilizada em Os anos. Não encontrando um conceito adequado ao objeto de estudo, apresentou-se uma expansão da noção de romance autobiográfico, levando em consideração todas as informações obtidas durante a pesquisa. Por fim, é feita uma análise do livro Os anos, discutindo seu enredo, simbolismos e apresentação das personagens femininas, culminando no cruzamento dos dados biográficos obtidos através de biografias e autobiografias com a história narrada.
The aim of this study is to discuss the connection between the private life of the British writer Virginia Woolf and her fictional work The years, pointing out which of her private experiences were used as a creative source in the autobiographical space present at the aforementioned title. The book, which is the object of this study, tells the story of a Victorian family that clearly resembles Woolf's own family. It is set from 1880 to 1930, thus depicting not only the changes in the families, but also in the British society as a whole. Having this study's purpose as basis, a biography of the writer was firstly presented, followed by a brief women's writing overview and by an analysis of Woolf's literary criticism, establishing a connection between her theory and the practice concerning the usage of private experiences. Secondly, theories on self-writing are discussed, aiming to find one which can define the writing practice used in The years. As a consequence for not finding a suitable concept for the object of this study, an expansion of the idea of autobiographical romance was introduced, taking all the information obtained during the research process into account. Finally, an examination of the book The years was carried out, analyzing its plot, symbolism and female characters, resulting in a cross-check of biographical data - which was obtained from biographies and autobiographies - and the story told.
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Richter, Yvonne Nicole. "A Critic in Her Own Right: Taking Virginia Woolf's Literary Criticism Seriously." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/56.
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Considered mostly ancillary to her fiction, Virginia Woolf’s prolific career in literary criticism has rarely been studied in its entirety and in its own right. This study situates her in the common critical practices of her day and crystallizes basic tenets and a critical theory of sorts from her critical journalism published 1904–1928: the author argues that Woolf does not advocate a policing role for the critic, but rather that critics foster art in collaboration with readers and writers. Finally, this work discusses Woolf’s appeal to writers to invest all their energy in improving their skills in character portrayal to adequately depict all classes and genders in order to invent a new kind of psychological fiction.
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Dunn, Jessica. "Unearthing Real Women: Reclaiming Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf from Their Suicide Narratives." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2016. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2139.
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Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are two well-known women writers of the twentieth century who committed suicide. The narratives created by their deaths have in some instances become as important as the canonical work they produced. In an effort to understand their motivations and struggles, critics and the public alike have sometimes reduced these women to victims of the patriarchy, mental illness, or even themselves.
Beginning with my own discovery of this issue in the legacies of Plath and Woolf combined with my personal dealings with suicide in my family, I recount how I lost these two women as exemplary figures because of their choice to commit suicide. I then take a look at what others have said about their deaths and how it has affected their legacies as writers. Finally, I take a look at Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Plath’s The Bell Jar for an alternate perspective on suicide. Through this journey, I recount how I have been able to regain my respect for these two talented women by considering multiple viewpoints and acknowledging the nuance inherent in any account.
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Lu, Qian Qian. "Troubling the female continuum in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse." Thesis, University of Macau, 2010. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2456335.
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Parker, Dixon Amy. "Towards a poetics of criticism : Adornoian negativity and the experiential in the essays and musical marginalia of Virginia Woolf." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2338/.
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Through an analysis of the work of Virginia Woolf and T.W. Adorno’s theory of the aesthetic, this dissertation seeks to develop a poetics of criticism that takes account of the philosophy of the non-identical in subjective experience. As the subversion of the positivist and subjectivist tendencies of identity thinking, Adorno’s negative dialectic is read here in parallel with Woolf’s work as an example of a discourse that preserves the particularity of experience. Much of Woolf’s writing about music is in the form of diary entries, letters and notes or jottings and is singularly unfinished. Her writing about music pushes her to the extremes of essayistic practice where she is forced to improvise and invent a musical-critical voice. This dissertation argues that subjectivity and aesthetic experience are constructed negatively in Woolf’s diaries, letters and essays and by reading her tendency to resist describing musical experiences as a resistance to the domination of conceptual subsumption, I hope to show that Woolf’s writing could offer a new perspective on criticism. The present work attempts to develop a three-fold thesis, the presentation of which will constitute a poetics of criticism. Firstly, Woolf’s attempts to write a critical selfhood actually serve as a critique of transcendental subjectivity and undermine the ideology of a priori subjectivity. Secondly, Woolf’s essays complement work done by Adorno on genre theory which asserts that contradiction remains essential to the critical essay, contradiction which secures the identity of negative dialectics and a contradiction that can simultaneously be read as fundamental to the architectonics of a modernist subjectivity. Woolf’s essays, therefore, will be read for their potential status as a means of critique. And thirdly, the technique of parataxis as a form of writing that Adorno thought best expressed the inaccessibility of objectivity will be shown to be decisive in analyzing Woolf’s fragments. What I hope to assemble, therefore, is a constellation of ideas that map several points ofconnection between Adorno and Woolf.By effecting a salvaging of Woolf’s musical marginalia this thesis argues that ostensibly ill-informed or naïve testimony can be given legitimacy within contemporary music criticism. In addition, this thesis presents all the references to music found in Woolf’s diaries and letters, and, as such, the appendices found at the back of the dissertation constitute not only the first attempt to bring this material together, but are also presented in such a way so as to reinforce the paratactical nature of Woolf’s writing about music. That is to say, structurally, the appendices appear as they appear in Woolf’s original texts, and this thesis has, self-consciously, tried to resist the conceptual overdetermination of these fragments. This structural consideration implies that this dissertation fulfils a performative, as well an analytical function.
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Belov, Andrey. "Unsubstantial Territories : Nomadic Subjectivity as Criticism of Psychoanalysis in Virginia Woolf's The Waves." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-165313.
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This essay looks at subjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves employing a psychoanalytic approach and using the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Woolf’s relation to the theories of her contemporary Sigmund Freud was unclear. Psychoanalytic scholarship on Woolf’s writings, nevertheless, established itself in 1980’s as a dominant scholarly topic and has been growing since. However, the rigidity and medicalizing discourse of psychoanalysis make it poorly compatible with Woolf’s feminist, anti-individualist writing. This essay is a reading of The Waves, in which psychoanalytic theory is infused with a Deleuzo-Guattarian approach. The theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and especially his concept of the Other, together with Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivity, are used as relevant tools for thinking about subjectivity in the context of The Waves. The resultant reading is a criticism of psychoanalysis. In this reading, two characters are looked at in detail: Percival and Bernard. Percival emerges as the Lacanian Other, who, situated at the central nexus of power, symbolises the tyrannies of individuality and masculinity. Simultaneously, Percival is detached from the metaphysical world of the novel. His death marks a shift from oppressive individuality towards nomadic subjectivity. For Bernard, nomadic subjectivity is a flight from the dead and stagnating centre towards periphery, where new ethics can be negotiated. The essay concludes with the implications of such reading: the affirmation of nomadic subjectivity makes the Deleuzo-Guattarian approach more relevant in the context of Woolf, whereas psychoanalytic striving towards structure, dualism, and focus on pathology are rejected as incompatible with her texts.
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Gallagher, Maureen. "Thinking Back through Our Fathers: Woolf Reading Shakespeare in Orlando and a Room of One's Own." unrestricted, 2008. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-07112008-152735/.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008.Title from file title page. Randy Malamud, committee chair; Meg Harper, Paul Schmidt, committee members. Electronic text (61 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 3, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-61).
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HOLLAND, ANYA B. "BLURRING BOUNDARIES: ISSUES OF GENDER, MADNESS, AND IDENTITY IN LIBBY LARSEN'S OPERA 'MRS. DALLOWAY'." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1122913675.
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Coulson, Marcella Meghan. ""Can you leave the light on? I'm afraid of the dark." : feminist criticism and the life writing of Virginia Woolf and Gloria Anzaldúa." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/44835.
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This project works with Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands: La Frontera to suggest that the problem of representing material feminisms in relational women’s life writing is located in white feminists’ desire to remain at home in their criticism. Bringing feminist theories on materiality, politics of belonging and affect together, I reflect on the ways my white privilege permits my criticism to haunt the very subjects whom it suggests I am writing for. In doing so, I demonstrate the ways feminism can be used by white feminists to protect the authority of white feminist criticism, and thus reinforce the white feminist’s privileged position as the subject of feminism. In this way, marking whiteness works to maintain white women’s privilege in feminism, rather than disturb their constructions of identity as feminists.
I work with Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderland theory to work through this problem by reflecting on my experiences of being in other women’s criticism. This enables me to work through affective, yet material boundaries between the white feminist self and other feminists. I argue that silence about the affective experiences of the contradictions that characterize white privilege for feminists permits white feminists to lean on the comforts of their knowledge of feminism, and to refuse to acknowledge other women’s writings as criticism.
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Banks, Gemma. "Impressions of an analyst : reassessing Sigmund Freud's literary style through a comparative study of the principles and fiction of Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Virginia Woolf & Dorothy Richardson." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2018. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/8368/.
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The connection between Sigmund Freud and modernism is firmly established and there is an increasing (though still limited) body of scholarship that adopts methods of literary analysis in approaching Freud's texts. This thesis adds depth and specificity to a broad claim to literariness by arguing that Freud can be considered a practitioner of modern literary impressionism. The claim is substantiated through close textual analysis of key texts from James Strachey' s Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, alongside theory and fiction by significant impressionist authors Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. The authors' respective approaches to various aspects of literary impressionism are considered, such as the methods of textual development, the instability of genre, and the stylised techniques utilised to convey the impression. This research illustrates that whilst each of the chosen novelists engages with literary impressionism differently, Freud's texts share common practice with each, facilitating the reassessment of the analyst as a specifically 'impressionist' author.
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Prikladnicki, Fábio. "Reinscrevendo a responsabilidade : figurações da alteridade entre o humano e o animal." reponame:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRGS, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/131624.
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Informada pelos pressupostos da área interdisciplinar conhecida como estudos animais, esta tese propõe uma leitura a contrapelo das figuras animais na literatura, na qual elas não são entendidas apenas como metáforas de certos aspectos da vida humana, mas como presenças textuais com um estatuto de personagens e, nessa condição, são interrogadas em sua alteridade. A questão central em pauta é: o que a metáfora diz sobre os animais e sobre a relação entre os animais e os seres humanos e o que significa des-figurar a metáfora e explorar a possibilidade de re-significar, a partir da textualidade ficcional, a relação humano-animal. Para tanto, desenho um panorama dos estudos animais, abordando o estado da arte no Brasil, inserindo tais estudos nas possibilidades de inovação no campo da literatura comparada. A seguir, elaboro um aporte teórico a partir da filosofia animal de Jacques Derrida, ao qual incorporo e coloco em discussão posicionamentos teóricos de Calarco (2008), Krell (2013), Lawlor (2007) e Naas (2010) sobre a questão em pauta. Por fim, realizo leituras comparadas entre A metamorfose (1915), de Franz Kafka, e Porcarias (1996), de Marie Darrieussecq, ambos sobre o tornar-se animal, e entre Flush (1933), de Virginia Woolf, e Timbuktu (1999), de Paul Auster, ambos sobre a domesticação de animais.Following the tenets of the interdisciplinary area of animal studies, this dissertation presents a reading of animal figures in literature against the grain, which means that they are not taken only as metaphors of certain aspects of human life but as textual presences with a status assigned to characters and, in this condition, are interrogated in their alterity. The central question to be explored is: what the animal metaphor says about animals and the relation of animal and human beings and what it means to de-figure the metaphor in order to explore the possibility of re-signifying, in ficcional textualities, the human/animal relation. In order to address these issues, I draw a panorama of animal studies, including the state of the art in Brazil, to contend that this area adds to the possibilities of innovation in the field of comparative literature. Then, I consider a theoretical framework of Jacques Derrida’s animal philosophy, also discussing theoretical positions of Calarco (2008), Krell (2013), Lawlor (2007) and Naas (2010) on this topic. Finally, I propose comparative readings of Franz Kafka’s The metamorphosis (1915) and Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig tales (1996), from the perspective of becoming animal, and of Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933) and Paul Auster’s Timbuktu (1999), both on domesticating animals.
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Stockton, Judith D. "Rhetorical analysis of feminist critics' references to Virginia Woolf." Thesis, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/1957/37385.
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Virginia Woolf wrote both prose and poetry, both fiction and non-fiction: she was
both a creative writer and a politically conscious reporter. She left a wealth of beautifully
crafted observations and comments that continue to be immensely quotable and influential.
Feminist critics today use Woolf's vocabulary to continue the feminist conversation which
she entered early in her life and consistently influenced as long as she lived and wrote. My
purpose in this essay is to identify some of the ways in which feminists strategically use
references to Virginia Woolf and A Room of One's Own to empower their own perspective
or to develop legitimacy for their own knowledge and discourse.Graduation date: 1992
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Fand, Roxanne J. "The dialogic self in novels by Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood." Thesis, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/9761.
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Niwa-Heinen, Maureen Anne. "Relational narrative desire : intersubjectivity and transsubjectivity in the novels of H.D. and Virginia Woolf." 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/342.
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"Female identity in Virginia Woolf and Wang Anyi." Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1994. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5887296.
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by Wanda Wing Yi Tsui.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1994.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-101).
Chapter CHAPTER ONE --- Gender and Identity: Subjectivity in Women's Writing --- p.1
Chapter CHAPTER TWO --- The Androgynous Personality Celebrated in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse --- p.20
Chapter CHAPTER THREE --- The Inner Growth of the Female Characters in Wang Anyi's Stories --- p.53
Chapter CHAPTER FOUR --- Female Identity: the Significance of Androgyny --- p.80
NOTES --- p.90
WORKS CITED --- p.92
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Nienaber, Bianca Lindi. "A search for literariness based on the critical reception of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10210/8448.
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M.A. (English)This dissertation begins by examining the central tenets of Russian Formalism and American New Criticism. Although it is a term coined by the Russian Formalists, both these schools of thought, in their own ways, are concerned with literariness – that is, that which distinguishes the literary work from other forms of writing. This study traces the ways in which these two critical movements account for the specifically literary language that they claim characterises literary works. Based on the principles derived from these two schools I analyse aspects of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and demonstrate that defamiliarization is at work on various levels of this novel. Thereafter, I examine criticism pertaining to Woolf and illustrate that there are numerous illuminating parallels that can be drawn between recent critics’ studies on Woolf and the principles of the formalists. In particular, I attempt to show that the principle of estranged form continues to inform our critical thought about Woolf’s works. I focus primarily on the arguments posited in two critical studies: Edward Bishop’s Virginia Woolf (1991) and Oddvar Holmesland’s Form as Compensation for Life: Fictive Patterns in Virginia Woolf’s Novels (1998). These studies were selected because they centre on questions of language and form and, as such, coincide in a number of interesting ways with the tenets of formalism.
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David, Raquel. "Developing a feminist autobiographical practice : an analysis of Virginia Woolf's Moments of being and Christa Wolf's A model childhood /." 2001.
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