Where other works of literary criticism are absorbed with the question--How to read a book?--Imagining Virginia Woolf asks a slightly different but more intriguing one: how does one read an author? It answers the question by undertaking an experiment in critical biography. The subject of this work is not Virginia Woolf, the person who wrote the novels, criticism, letters, and famous diary, but a different being altogether, someone or something Maria DiBattista identifies as "the figment of the author." This is the Virginia Woolf who lives intermittently in the pages of her writings and in the imagination of her readers. Drawing on Woolf's own extensive remarks on the pleasures and perils of reading, DiBattista argues that reading Woolf, in fact reading any author, involves an encounter with this imaginative figment, whose distinct stylistic traits combine to produce that beguiling phantom--the literary personality.

Cities of the United States (CUS) provides a one-stop source for all the vital information you need on 189 of America's top cities-those fastest-growing, as well as those with a particular historical, political, industrial, and/or commercial significance. Spanning the entire country, from Anaheim to Virginia Beach, each geographically-arranged volume of CUS brings together a wide range of comprehensive data. The volumes include: The South; The West; The Midwest; and The Northeast.

Virginia Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta has a bloody puzzle on her hands: five headless, limbless cadavers in Ireland, plus four similar victims in a landfill back home. Is a serial butcher loose in Virginia? That's what the panicked public thinks, thanks to a local TV reporter who got the leaked news from her boyfriend, Scarpetta's vile rival, Investigator Percy Ring. But the butchered bodies are so many red herrings intended to throw idiots like Ring off the track. Instead of a run-of-the-mill serial killer, we're dealing with a shadowy figure who has plans involving mutant smallpox, mass murder, and messing with Scarpetta's mind by e-mailing her gory photos of the murder scenes, along with cryptic AOL chat-room messages. The coolest innovation: Scarpetta's gorgeous genius niece, Lucy, equips her with a DataGlove and a VPL Eyephone, and she takes a creepy virtual tour of the e-mailed crime scene.

Product Description

This book argues that Woolf's preoccupation with the literary past had a profound impact on the content and structure of her novels.

It analyses Woolf's reading and writing practices via her essays, diaries and reading notebooks in order to provide a framework for examining her response to the literary past. It presents chronological studies of eight novels, exploring how Woolf's intensive reading surfaced in her fiction. The book sheds light on Woolf's varied and intricate use of literary allusions; examines ways in which Woolf revisited and revised plots and tropes from earlier fiction; and looks at how she used parody as a means both of critical comment and homage.

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