Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-garde: War, Civilization, Modernity

by Christine Froula

Overview

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father's library and in Bloomsbury's London extension of Cambridge, Virginia Woolf came of age in the prewar decades, when progressive political and social movements gave hope that Europe "might really be on the brink of becoming civilized," as Leonard Woolf put it. For pacifist Bloomsbury, heir to Europe's unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace—and, in E. M. Forster's words, "the only genuine movement in English civilization"— the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarities within Europe: belligerent nationalisms, rapacious racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems, a tragic and unnecessary war that mobilized sixty-five million and left thirty-seven million casualties. An avant-garde in the twentieth-century struggle against the violence within European civilization, Bloomsbury and Woolf contributed richly to interwar debates on Europe's future at a moment when democracy's triumph over fascism and communism was by no means assured.

Woolf honed her public voice in dialogue with contemporaries in and beyond Bloomsbury— John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry to Sigmund Freud (published by the Woolfs'Hogarth Press), Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and many others—and her works embody and illuminate the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought. An ambitious history of her writings in relation to important currents in British intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century, this book explores Virginia Woolf's narrative journey from her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her last, Between the Acts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231134446
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/22/2004
Series:	Gender and Culture Series
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Christine Froula is professor of English, comparative literature, and gender studies at Northwestern University and a past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society. Her extensive publications include Modernism's Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations
Preface
1. Civilization and "my civilisation": Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde
2. Rachel's Great War: Civilization, Sacrifice, and the Enlightenment of Women in Melymbrosia and The Voyage Out
3. The Death of Jacob Flanders: Greek Illusion and Modern War in Jacob's Room
4. Mrs. Dalloway's Postwar Elegy: Women, War, and the Art of Mourning
5. Picture the World: The Quest for the Thing Itself in To the Lighthouse
6. A Fin in a Waste of Waters: Women, Genius, Freedom in Orlando, A Room of One's Own, and The Waves
7. The Sexual Life of Women: Experimental Genres, Experimental Publics from The Pargiters to The Years
8. St. Virginia's Epistle to an English Gentleman: Sex, Violence, and the Public Sphere in Three Guineas
9. The Play in the Sky of the Mind: Between the Acts of Civilization's Masterplot
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Marianne DeKoven

This is, bar none, the best reading of Woolf's total oeuvre I have ever seen. It will become the standard text of Woolf studies; all future work on Woolf will have to refer to it.

— Marianne DeKoven, Rutgers University

Brenda R. Silver

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

Karen Lawrence

An important book that restores a public voice to Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Froula takes pains to show how Woolf's formal experiments crafted the artist's address to a public who witnessed the drama of the two World Wars and momentous social upheaval. In emphasizing Woolf's rhetorical construction of her audience, Froula links Woolf the writer to the Woolfs as publishers of the Hogarth Press. She admirably charts Virginia Woolf's dual ventures of reforming society and re-forming the genre of the novel.

— Karen Lawrence, University of California, Irvine

Editorial Reviews

Froula's fascinating new book... makes a timely contribution to modernist scholarship.

Woolf Studies Annual - Jane Garrity

Christine Froula's Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde is a timely and valuable contribution to Woolf studies emphasizing Woolf's relation to the political, aesthetic, and feminine milieu of her own era and beyond.

Modernism / Modernity - Vera Neverow

Provocative... intensely optimistic... Impressive body of work on Woolf and modernism... Provides a fresh and challenging set of readings.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany - Helen Southworth

Froula's book brims with fresh historical and political insights... [Her] book is crucial.

Chicago Tribune - Julia Keller

What a pleasure to read Froula's smart, wide-ranging, and often exquisite book.

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature - Jessica Berman

We can be grateful to Christine Froula for this most stimulating study which significantly broadens the scope of Woolf's work.

In-between - Christine Reynier

In this brilliant, indeed indispensable, study, Froula (Northwestern Univ.) places Woolf's major works in the context of Bloomsbury as a modernist movement...Essential.

Choice

This major new book is a significant and substantial addition to [Froula's] contribution to Woolf studies.

Virginia Woolf Bulletin - Janfarie Skinner

Froula pursues her task passionately in a book which is energetic and likeable.

Times Literary Supplement - Jim Stewart

We can be grateful to Christine Froula for this most stimulating study which significantly broadens the scope of Woolf's work.

— Christine Reynier

In-between

What a pleasure to read Froula's smart, wide-ranging, and often exquisite book.

— Jessica Berman

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Froula's fascinating new book... makes a timely contribution to modernist scholarship.

— Jane Garrity

Woolf Studies Annual

This major new book is a significant and substantial addition to [Froula's] contribution to Woolf studies.

— Janfarie Skinner

Virginia Woolf Bulletin

Froula's book brims with fresh historical and political insights... [Her] book is crucial.

— Julia Keller

Chicago Tribune

Provocative... intensely optimistic... Impressive body of work on Woolf and modernism... Provides a fresh and challenging set of readings.

— Helen Southworth

Virginia Woolf Miscellany

Christine Froula's Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde is a timely and valuable contribution to Woolf studies emphasizing Woolf's relation to the political, aesthetic, and feminine milieu of her own era and beyond.

— Vera Neverow

Modernism/Modernity

Froula pursues her task passionately in a book which is energetic and likeable.

— Jim Stewart

Times Literary Supplement

Christine Froula's Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde is a timely and valuable contribution to Woolf studies emphasizing Woolf's relation to the political, aesthetic, and feminine milieu of her own era and beyond.

— Vera Neverow

Modernism / Modernity