Print ISBN: 978-1-63700-351-0
# of Pages: 300
# of Volumes: 1
Print List Price: $105
e-ISBN: 978-1-63700-352-7
eBook User Price: $105
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Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf

Editors: Laura Nicosia and James F. Nicosia
October 2022


After one hundred years of modernism and with the centennial anniversaries of Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf is more popular and vital than ever. The current social and political climate fosters a new appreciation for Woolf's writings, in particular her critiques of social marginalization, gender identities, queerness, and sexual cultures. This volume offers these valuable and necessary conversations in language that is accessible and yet scholarly.

This volume, like all others in the Critical Insights series, is divided into several sections. It begins with an introductory “About This Volume: Reimagining Virginia Woolf” essay, followed by another work titled “On Virginia Woolf: Twentieth-Century Writer for the Twenty-First Century,” by volume editors Laura Nicosia and James F. Nicosia. This is followed by a Biography of Virginia Woolf written by Nicole Lyn Lawrence.

A collection of four Critical Contexts essays are intended to treat the novel

  • From a historical vantage point
  • In terms of its critical reception
  • Using a specific critical lens
  • And by comparing and contrasting it with another important work

This section opens with an essay by Sara Penn titled, “Historical Context: Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Authorship followed by a piece by Amy Leshinsky, “Critical Reception of Virginia Woolf: Woolf Belongs to No One Movement”. This essay discusses the mixed review of Virginia Woolf’s works beginning with her first publication in 1915 to posthumous critiques, showing the impact of her writing through the decades on philosophy, androgyny, and postcolonialism. The following two articles are written by Michael Patrick Hart and Elissa Greenwald. The first, “’That Detestable Place’: Destroying (and Rebuilding) Cambridge with Virginia Woolf” examines Woolf’s disdain of Cambridge University for its poor treatment of women and its class-based intellectual gatekeeping, while also promoting the idea of rebuilding the university as one that goes against the classism of the English university system as well as an exploratory mode of intellectual development outside of a rigid program. In the final essay, “Public Spaces and Private Places in The Portrait of a Lady and Mrs. Dalloway,” by Greenwald looks to examine the contrast of the two works and how architecture, public spaces, and private spaces impacts the thought process and emotional state of the protagonists as they navigate both private and public spheres.

Following these four Critical Context essays is the Critical Readings section of this book, which contains the following essays:

  • “A granite wall in the darkness”: Feminine Temporality in Dalloway, by Beth Campbell
  • Intertextual Einsteinian Relativity in Woolf’s Dalloway and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”, by Nancy Ann Watanabe
  • Breaking Down the Ideology of Separate Spheres: The Time Concepts in Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, by Pei-Wen Clio Kao
  • Polyphony in The Waves by Virginia Woolf and In the Shadow of the Wind by Anne Hébert, by Camille Néron
  • Narrative Streams of Consciousness: (Re)Telling Perceptive Experiences in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, by Tammie Jenkins
  • Human/Nonhuman Symbiosis in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, by Oliver Case
  • Virginia Woolf Empowers Female Agency in Androgynous Figures from Pre-Raphaelite Paintings, by Myra Tatum Salcedo
  • Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and the Modernist Family Saga, by Nicholas Birns
  • Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf: The Novelists’ Art, by Roberta White
  • Parties, Pins, and Perspective: Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, and Matrilineal Inheritance, by Emily Daniell Magruder

Each essay in Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf includes a list of Works Cited and detailed endnotes. In the final section, Resources, easy-to-follow lists are provided to help guide the reader through important dates and moments in the author’s life, beginning with a Chronology of Virginia Woolf’s Life. This is followed by a list of Works by Virginia Woolf and a Bibliography. Finally, this section closes with an About the Editor section, Contributors, and a detailed Index.

The Critical Insights Series distills the best of both classic and current literary criticism of the world’s most studied literature. Edited and written by some of academia’s most distinguished literary scholars, Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf provides authoritative, in-depth scholarship that students and researchers will rely on for years. This volume is destined to become a valuable purchase for all.

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