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Virginia Woolf wrote hundreds of essays during her lifetime. The total varies from “nearly 600” (Fernald 160) to “640,” (Rigel Daughtery 9) so it can be difficult to locate just the right essay when needed. For that reason,  sometimes a slim collection of Virginia Woolf essays that focus on a specific topic is just the thing.

Here are two.

On freedom

The first is part of a 27-volume Vintage Mini collection, a Vintage Classic published by Penguin/Random House. Titled Liberty, it includes selections from A Room of One’s Own (1929), The Waves (1931), and the essays “Street Haunting” and “How Should One Read a Book.”

Here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes – jacket quote from Liberty (2018)

On the visual arts

The second is the twentieth volume in the ekphrasis series published by David Zwirner Books in 2021 and is a collection of Woolf’s writings on the visual arts.

Titled Oh, to Be a Painter!, the volume begins with an introduction by Claudia Tobin and includes Woolf’s longest essay on painting, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), alongside shorter essays and reviews, including “Pictures and Portraits” (1920) and “Pictures” (1925).

References:

Fernald, Anne E. “A Feminist Public Sphere? Virginia Woolf’s Revisions of the Eighteenth Century.” Feminist Studies 31:1 (2005): 158-182.

Daugherty, Beth Rigel. “The Transatlantic Virginia Woolf: Essaying an American Audience.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 76 (2009): 9-11.

 

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Virginia Woolf is becoming ever more popular in Turkey. Tuesday, we posted about a new platform for budding Turkish writers who have an interest in Woolf. Today, we share news of a free online event focused on Woolf and literary history that is part of the Virginia Woolf Society Turkey’s Woolf Seminar series.

What: A free online talk on “Unwriting and Rewriting History and Literary History: Woolf’s Fictions and Essays,” as part of the Woolf Seminars series of the Virginia Woolf Society Turkey.

Who: Anne Besnault, senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Rouen – Normandy, France, will be the speaker.

Date: Friday, September 29
Time: 7 p.m. Turkey time or noon EST.  (Please check your local time.)
Cost: Free.
Registration: Everyone is welcome to register and attend, using this Eventbrite link:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/…/unwriting-and-rewriting…

About the talk

The aims of Besnault’s talk are:

  • to introduce the audience to Woolf’s historical thought, as seen from the vantage point of the past and contemporary historiographical discourses;
  • to offer a new vision of Woolf as a literary historian essentially interested in the textuality of history;
  • and to uncover the specific coherence of her history of nineteenth-century women’s literature beyond its apparent heterogeneity and contradictory impulses.

About Besnault

Besnault’s research focuses on modernist fiction and criticism, short story theory, genre and gender studies in nineteenth- and twentieth century British literature, literary history, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf’s essays and fiction.

With Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, she is the co-editor of Beyond the Victorian and Modernist Divide: Remapping the Turn-of-the-Century Break in Literature, Culture and the Visual Arts (Routledge, 2018). She is also the author of Virginia Woolf’s Unwritten Histories: Conversations with the Nineteenth Century (Routledge: 2022).

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The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf’s book of essays published in 1925 with a jacket design by her sister Vanessa Bell, was provisionally titled Reading.

In it, she planned to revise some of her previously published essays and add some new ones, according to Mark Hussey in Virginia Woolf A to Z. Among its most important essays are “On Not Knowing Greek,” “Modern Fiction,” and “How It Strikes a Contemporary.”

One hundred years ago today, in her Sept. 5, 1923, diary entry, Woolf fills the half hour before dinner with her thoughts about beginning to write her book of collected essays:

A cold douche should be taken (& generally is) before beginning a book. It invigorates; makes one say “Oh all right. I write to please myself,” & so go ahead. It also has the effect of making me more definite & outspoken in my style, which I imagine all to the good. At any rate, I began for the 5th but last time, I swear, what is now to be called The Common Reader; & did the first page quite moderately well this morning. After all this stew, its odd how, as soon as I begin, a new aspect, never all this 2 or 3 years thought of, at once becomes clear; & gives the whole bundle a new proportion. To curtail, I shall really investigate literature with a view to answering certain questions about ourselves–Characters are to be merely views: personality must be avoided at all costs. I’m sure my Conrad adventure taught me this. Directly you specify hair, age, &tc something frivolous, or irrelevant, gents the book –Dinner! – Diary 2, 265.

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Save Friday, April 28, at 3 p.m. ET for the Woolf Salon Project No. 24: On Wonder.

Organizers from the International Virginia Woolf Society say, “Grab your favorite unicorn horn, your box of grubs, your strange silks and seabeasts, your astrolabe and ambergris, your magic glasses full of emerald light and blue mystery as we join guest hosts Angela Harris and Eret Talviste for a discussion of two Woolf essays, “The Elizabethan Lumber Room” (1925) and “Sir Thomas Browne” (1923).”

Where to find the readings

  • “The Elizabethan Lumber Room” appears in the First Common Reader and is available online.You can also find it in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4: 1925-1928, pp. 53–61.
  • “Sir Thomas Browne”—originally published in the Times Literary Supplement —appears in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919-1924, on pp. 368–72. It is also available via Dropbox.

Check your time zone

Time Zone conversions:

12 p.m. PT (Los Angeles)
3 p.m. ET (New York)
4 p.m. Brasilia
8 p.m. BST (London)
9 p.m. CEST (Paris)
5 a.m. AEST Saturday 4/29 (Sydney)

Salons typically run about two hours, and the event will be recorded for later viewing for members of the International Virginia Woolf Society.

How to join

Anyone can join the group, which usually meets on one Friday of each month via Zoom and focuses on a single topic or text. Just contact woolfsalonproject@gmail.com to sign up for the email list and receive the Zoom link.

Background on the Salon

The Salon Conspirators — Benjamin Hagen, Shilo McGiff, Amy Smith, and Drew Shannon — began the Woolf Salon Project in July 2020 to provide opportunities for conversation and conviviality among Woolf-interested scholars, students, and common readers during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The Woolf Salon usually meets monthly on Zoom. Anyone can join the conversation.

After a four-month hiatus, the Woolf Salon Conspirators have announced that they are  starting up the 2023 Woolf Salon Project with Woolf Salon No. 23: “The Lives of the Obscure.”

Where and when

The discussion will take place on Zoom Friday, Feb. 17, at 3 p.m. ET (New York). Other time zones are listed below, but please double check them!

2 p.m. CT (Chicago)
12 p.m. PT (Los Angeles)
5 p.m. Brasilia
8 p.m. GMT (London)
9 p.m. CET (Paris)
11 p.m. MSK (Moscow)
7 a.m. AEDT Saturday (Sydney)

The essay and where to find it

The 23rd salon will feature a rich conversation about Woolf’s essay (from The Common Reader [1925]), “The Lives of the Obscure.”

You’ll find the essay in any copy of The Common Reader, in Vol. 4 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (pp. 118–45), and on Project Gutenberg.

How to join

Anyone can join the group, which usually meets on one Friday of each month via Zoom and focuses on a single topic or text. Just contact woolfsalonproject@gmail.com to sign up for the email list and receive the Zoom link.

Background on the Salon

The Salon Conspirators — Benjamin Hagen, Shilo McGiff, Amy Smith, and Drew Shannon — began the Woolf Salon Project in July 2020 to provide opportunities for conversation and conviviality among Woolf-interested scholars, students, and common readers during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

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