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.
Over sixty years after her death, the writings of Virginia Woolf are a source of continuing power and ever-increasing influence. Recognized in her own time and country as one of the most significant of the Modernists, Woolf has achieved a stature, in the twenty-first century, of international prominence. Admired first in the era of New Criticism as a supreme formalist writer, Woolf has since been recognized as one of the most important and influential feminist writers of the twentieth century and as a writer whose works are dynamically engaged with the political, philosophical, historical and materialist issues of her time.
An Introduction to Virginia Woolf is a comprehensive guide to her entire career, covering her major novels in depth. Accessibly written for a student audience, assuming no previous knowledge. Includes the basic facts as well as up-to-date critical approaches and features a guide to further reading.
