This compilation of 31 essays presented at the 2010 conference explores Woolf’s complex engagement with the natural world, an engagement that was as political as it was aesthetic. Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman are the editors.
The essays in the collection cover diverse topics including:
ecofeminism,
the nature of time,
the nature of the self,
nature and sporting,
botany,
climate,
landscape and more.
Contributors include Verita Sriratana, Patrizia Muscogiuri, Katherine Hollis, Bonnie Kime Scott, Carrie Rohman, Diana Swanson, Elisa Kay Sparks, Beth Rigel Daugherty, Jane Goldman, and Diane Gillespie, among many others from the international community of Woolf scholars.
You can order a hard copy or download a PDF of the book. The price of the trade paperback is $24.95. You will also find links to other volumes of Woolf Conference proceedings on the Clemson University Digital Press website.
Molly’s accomplishments are impressive. She wrote a companion book on Mrs. Dalloway that illuminates the hidden and misunderstood in one of Virginia Woolf’s most well-read novels. Called Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Invisible Presences, it is designed for both teachers and students and is available from Clemson University Digital Press.
She is also the author of “The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs. Dalloway,” which was published in the January 1999 issue of Twentieth Century Literature, and “The Midday Topos,” published in the Winter 1990 issue of that same publication.
This year’s Virginia Woolf conference is coming up soon. And organizers continue to make additions to the program.
The most recent is a staged reading called “Life in the Country: A Dramatic Reading for Five Voices,” by Roberta Palumbo of Holy Names University.
The 50-minute chamber play features dialogue created from the letters, diaries, and memoirs of Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dr. Octavia Wilberforce and Louie Mayer.
It will be performed by professional actors from Lexington, Ky., and is scheduled to follow Thursday’s opening reception. It will be on stage at Georgetown’s Lab Theatre, right across the street from the Art Gallery, where the reception will be held.
Woolf scholars, oft known as Woolfians, cannot be easily divided into two camps when it comes to gender studies.
According to Madelyn Detloff of Miami University, there are no hard and fast lines drawn between ‘lesbian and gay studies’ Woolfians and ‘queer studies’ Woolfians.
She made her point during a recent discussion about the topic on the VWoolf Listserv.
The discussion was kicked off by a question from Ann Marie Lindsey, student at the CUNY Graduate Center. As a student in Mary Ann Caws’ Art and Literature in Bloomsbury course, Lindsey asked how current queer studies scholars view Virginia Woolf and/or the Bloomsbury set.
The resulting conversation became a bit heated at times. But in between, the following contributions to a bibliography on the topic were offered by participants.
Julie Taddeo, “A Modernist Romance? Lytton Strachey and the Women of Bloomsbury.” Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings. Eds. Harrison and Peterson (1997).
Tirza Latimer and Jane Marie Garrity. “Queer Cross Gender Collaborations.” The Cambridge Gay and Lesbian Companion to Literature. 2010.
Robert Martin and George Piggffford, eds. Queer Forster. U of Chicago Press. 1997.
Christopher Reed. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
____. “Bloomsbury Bashing: Homophobia and the Politics of Criticism in the Eighties.” Genders 11 (1991): 58-80.
____. “Making History: The Bloomsbury Group’s Construction of Aesthetic and Sexual Identity.” Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History. Ed. Whitney Davis. Binghamton: Haworth Press, 1994. 189-224.
Georgia Johnston. The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography: Reading Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, and Gertrude Stein. 2007.
Brenda Helt. “Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects’: Bisexuality and Woolf’s Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity.” Twentieth-Century Literature. Expected publication date: 2010.
Kathryn Simpson. “‘Queer Fish’: Woolf’s Writing of Desire Between Women in The Voyage Out and Mrs Dalloway.” Woolf Studies Annual 9 (2003). 55-82.
Erica Delsandro, “‘Myself—It was Impossible’: Queering History in Between the Acts.” Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007). 87-109.
D. A. Boxwell, “‘In the Urinal’: Woolf Around Gay Men.” Virginia Woolf and Her Influences: Selected Papers from the Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jeanette McVicker & Laura Davis (Pace UP 1998). 173-78.
David Eberly, “Talking it All Out: Homosexual Disclosure in Woolf.” Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations. Selected Papers from the Second Annual Conference. Ed Vara Neverow-Turk & Mark Hussey (Pace UP 1993).
Write quickly. You have less than a week to submit your piece on “Woolf and the Natural World” for the Fall 2010 issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.
The Miscellany is seeking articles examining the natural world–gardens, landscapes, animals, ecology, etc.–in Woolf’s life and writing. Articles addressing teaching Woolf and nature are also welcome.
According to the Miscellany’s Web site, the publication was founded by Dr. J. J. Wilson, now emerita professor of English at Sonoma State University in California. The first issue was published in fall 1973. The publication now resides at Southern Connecticut State University.
