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Virginia Woolf was a civilian, a noncombatant during the Great War. Unlike the war poet Wilfred Owen, she had not seen "God through mud." Yet, although she was remembered by her husband as "the least political animal . . . since Aristotle invented the definition," and called "an instinctive pacifist" by Alex Zwerdling, her experience and memory of the war became a touchstone against which life itself was measured. Virginia Woolf and the Great War focuses on Woolf's war consciousness and how her sensitivity to representations of war in the popular press and authorized histories affected both the development of characters in her fiction and her nonfictional and personal writings. As the seamle...
Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father's library and in Bloomsbury's London extension of Cambridge, Virginia Woolf came of age in the prewar decades, when progressive political and social movements gave hope that Europe "might really be on the brink of becoming civilized," as Leonard Woolf put it. For pacifist Bloomsbury, heir to Europe's unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace—and, in E. M. Forster's words, ...
Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries helps us comprehend the ways that women writers and artists contributed to and complicated modernism by contextualizing them alongside Woolf's work.
Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans feared an invasion or attack would occur on US soil. In this timely and authoritative book, Matthew Dallek narrates the creation of a federal agency, the Office of Civilian Defense, founded to protect the homeland.
The first cross-disciplinary history of women's international thought, analysing leading international thinkers of the twentieth century.
Pandemic Re-Awakenings offers a multi-level and multi-faceted exploration of a century of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, arguably the greatest catastrophe in human history. Twenty-three researchers present original perspectives by critically investigating the hitherto unexplored vicissitudes of memory in the interrelated spheres of personal, communal, medical, and cultural histories in different national and transnational settings across the globe. The volume reveals how, even though the Great Flu was overshadowed by the commemorative culture of the Great War, recollections of the pandemic persisted over time to re-emerge towards the centenary of the 'Spanish' Flu and burst into public consciousness following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapters chart historiographical neglect (while acknowledging the often-unnoticed dialogues between scientific and historical discourses), probe silences, and trace vestiges of social and cultural memories that long remained outside of what was considered collective memory.
This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in twentieth-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Woolf, Benjamin, and Sebald, it engages the century's preoccupation with world-ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. The spectacle of world-ending proliferates as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the end of all. In conversation with discussions of the century's passionfor the real, the author reads the century's obsession with negative forms of ending and outcome. Drawing connections between current interest in trauma and the sublime, she reframes the terms of the modernist experiment and its aesthetics from the lens of a late sublime
For students of modern literature, the works of Virginia Woolf are essential reading. In her novels, short stories, essays, polemical pamphlets and in her private letters she explored, questioned and refashioned everything about modern life: cinema, sexuality, shopping, education, feminism, politics and war. Her elegant and startlingly original sentences became a model of modernist prose. This is a clear and informative introduction to Woolf's life, works, and cultural and critical contexts, explaining the importance of the Bloomsbury group in the development of her work. It covers the major works in detail, including To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves and the key short stories. As well as providing students with the essential information needed to study Woolf, Jane Goldman suggests further reading to allow students to find their way through the most important critical works. All students of Woolf will find this a useful and illuminating overview of the field.
In this 2005 book, Jaffe examines the interactions of modernist literary fame and celebrity culture in the early twentieth century.
'They also serve who only stand and wait' The idea of there being a 'women's writing' during the First World War is often dismissed. The war, the story goes, was a masculine domain, and as women did not fight, it is also assumed that they were excluded from a war experience. This bibliography challenges that view by listing and annotating hundreds of published books, articles, memoirs, diaries and letters written by women during the First World War. Included are: * Virginia Woolf * Katherine Mansfield * G.B Stern * Brenda Girvin * known and unknown autobiographers and diarists * writers of pro and anti-war propaganda * journal and magazine articles * literary, cultural and historical criticism