Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the England of her day. Woolf pretty much invented modern feminist criticism.
During Virginia Woolf's lifetime Britain's position in the world changed, and so did the outlook of its people. The Boer War and the First World War forced politicians and citizens alike to ask how far the power of the state extended into the lives of individuals; the rise of fascism provided one menacing answer.
How do we feel for others? Must we try to understand other minds? Do we have to respect others' autonomy, or even their individuality? Or might sympathy be fundamentally more intuitive, bodily and troubling? Taking as her focus the work of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Vernon Lee (the first novelist to use the word 'empathy'), Kirsty Martin explores how modernist writers thought about questions of sympathetic response.
Masterworks of Early 20th-Century Literature (The Great Courses Series)
Complete two-part set of 24 lectures (each 30 minutes long) on 12 audio CDs with accompanying course guides. In original hard cases. With Professor David Thorburn as your guide, you'll see how Modernist authors created new techniques to reflect an increasingly complex post-Victorian world. This tradition includes some of the greatest authors world has known—Joyce, Faulkner, Conrad, Woolf, Kafka. Their works are some of the most challenging—yet rewarding—you'll ever encounter.
"Tough-minded, richly detailed, Christine Froula's engaging argument compellingly situates Woolf at the heart of modernism's Enlightenment project. 'Thinking is my fighting,' Woolf wrote; Froula brilliantly does the same, challenging us to take seriously Woolf's provocative assertion that 'this civilisation... depends upon me.'" -- Brenda R. Silver, Dartmouth College.
