Night and Day (published on 20 October 1919) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. Set in Edwardian London, Night and Day contrasts the daily lives of two friends, Katherine Hilbery and Mary Datchet. The novel examines the relationships between love, marriage, happiness, and success.
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.
Modernism and Eugenics Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration
In Modernism and Eugenics, Donald Childs reveals how Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of racial improvement, and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. He traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such modernist works as Mrs. Dalloway, The Waste Land, and Yeats's late poetry and early plays.
What happened to beauty? How did the university literature classroom turn into a seminar on politics? Focusing on such writers as Don DeLillo, Virginia Woolf, and James Merrill, this book examines what has been lost to literature as a discipline, and to literary criticism as a practice, as a result of efforts to reduce the aesthetic to the ideological. Green-Lewis and Soltan celebrate the return of beauty as a subject in its own right to literary studies, a return all the more urgent given beauty’s ability to provide not merely consolation but a sense of order and control in the context of a threatening political world.
By the time she was twenty-four, Virginia Woolf had suffered a series of devastating losses that later she would describe as “sledge-hammer blows,” beginning with the death of her mother when she was thirteen years old and followed by those of her half-sister, father, and brother. Yet vulnerable as she was (“skinless” was her word) she began, through these years, to practice her art—and to discover how it could serve her. Ultimately, she came to feel that it was her “shock-receiving capacity” that had made her a writer.
