Abstract
So much critical material has been produced on Virginia Woolf that it is not uncommon for new books to begin by referring to this mass of material. Inevitably, such a lively field of scholarship produces contradictions; arguments with current doxa and attempts to construct new models are what makes scholarship lively. So Woolf emerges from different texts as the most political of writers or a writer wholly unpossessed of a political mind, as embedded in or radically undermining the existing cultural order, as part of a hegemonic and safe mainstream or as constantly taking risks and continually endangered. Woolf’s life and work variously exemplify bourgeois Victorian guilt towards those born without middle-class advantages; a radical political project of overthrowing the oppression of women and the working class, tied to a radical formal project of destabilising the essay and the novel; an examination of the parasitic class and sex relations of English society; a conspiracy against patriarchal language; a dominated gender position within a dominant class fraction; anti-fascist struggle; crypto-fascist intolerance; self-conscious modernism; ahistorical, mannered aestheticism.1 The episodes of psychic distress, and associated attempts at suicide, that punctuate this contested life and work are also sites of argument.
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Virginia Woolf
Nigel Nicolson, Virginia Woolf (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), 18–19;
Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 11;
Kathleen Dobie, ‘This is the Room that Class Built: the Structures of Sex and Class in Jacob’s Room’, in Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: a Centenary Celebration, ed. Jane Marcus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 196;
Raymond Williams, The Bloomsbury Fraction’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: NLB and Verso Editions, 1980), 162;
Erin G. Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 160;
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), 209;
Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism: Volume 1: the Women of 1928 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995);
Carola M. Kaplan and Anne B. Simpson, ‘Introduction: Edwardians and Modernists: Literary Evaluation and the Problem of History’, in Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist Literature, eds Carola M. Kaplan and Anne B. Simpson (New York: St Martins Press, 1996)
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf a Biography [1972] (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), 35, 44;
Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989);
Stephen Trombley, All That Summer She Was Mad: Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors (London: Junction Books, 1981), 10;
Allie Glenny, Ravenous Identity: Eating and Eating Distress in the Life and Work of Virginia Woolf (New York: St Martins Press, 1999);
Peter Dally, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Manic Depression and the Life of Virginia Woolf (New York: St Martins Press, 1999);
Irene Coates, Who’s Afraid of Leonard Woolf? A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf (Sydney: Brandl & Schlesinger, 1998)
Shirley Sharon-Zisser, ‘“Some Little Language Such As Lovers Use”: Virginia Woolf’s Elemental Erotics of Simile’, American Imago 2, 2 (2001), 567–96, 575; Marcus, Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy 187
Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 17
Fredric Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 47
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas [1938] (London: Hogarth, 1968), 97–8, 63–4
Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), 692
Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill’ [1926], in The Moment and Other Essays (London, Hogarth, 1947), 15–16
Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: Volume 2: 1911–1969 [1964–1969] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 51–2
Cited in Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick, ‘Epilogue’, in Bloomsbury/Freud: the Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924–1925, eds Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), 309
E.M. Forster, ‘Virginia Woolf’ [1941], in Two Cheers for Democracy [1951] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 254
J.F. Holms, ‘Mrs Dalloway’, in Towards Standards of Criticism: Selections from The Calendar of Modern Letters 1925–7, ed. F.R. Leavis [1933] (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 49–50
Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public [1932] (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 5, 61
Andrew McNeillie, ‘Introduction’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 4: 1925–1928 ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1994), xvi-xvii
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 306–7
Cited in E. Fuller Torey, The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St Elizabeth’s (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1984), 110
John R. Maze, Virginia Woolf Feminism, Creativity and the Unconscious (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1997), 64, 84
Ulysses L. D’Aquila, Bloomsbury and Modernism (New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Paris: Peter Lang, 1989), 158–9
Denise Russell, Women, Madness and Medicine (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 136–8;
Barbara Hill Rigney, Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel: Studies in Brontë, Woolf Lessing and Atwood (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 55
Gordon Claridge, Ruth Pryor and Gwen Watkins, Sounds from the Bell Jar: Ten Psychotic Authors (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 46
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Hogarth Press, 1958) 158, 162
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 192
Ekbert Faas, Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988), 7
Albert C. Buckley, The Basis of Psychiatry (Psychobiological Medicine): a Guide to the Study of Mental Disorders for Students and Practitioners (Philadelphia and London: J.B Lippincott Company, 1920), 318;
D.K. Henderson and R.D. Gillespie, A Text-Book of Psychiatry: for Students and Practitioners, 4th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 233, 237;
V.E. Fisher, An Introduction to Abnormal Psychology, revised edition (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 231, 260
Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (London: Hutchison Radius, 1989), 28
Elizabeth Podnieks, Daily Modernism: the Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (Montreal, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queeen’s University Press, 2000), 109
Podnieks, Daily Modernism, 5; Lee, Virginia Woolf 16; Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5
Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), xv
Eileen Sypher, Wisps of Violence: Producing Public and Private Politics in the Turn-of-the-Century British Novel (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 14–15
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993), 268
Marta Caminero-Santangelo, The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity is Not Subversive (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 20; Irene Coates, Who’s Afraid of Leonard Woolf? 125
Nikolas Rose, The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England 1869–1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 39, 97
John Forrester, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 79
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 114–15
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Epidemics of the Will’, in Incorporations, eds Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 591
Kate Millett, The Loony Bin Trip [1990] (London: Virago, 1991), 315
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© 2003 Kylie Valentine
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Valentine, K. (2003). Virginia Woolf. In: Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919366_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919366_5
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