Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View

Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View PDF

Author: R. Rubenstein

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-09-14

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0230100554

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This book brings together Virginia Woolf's essays and book reviews on Russian literature; her unpublished reading notes on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev; and new and insightful scholarly commentary concerning her response to each of the major Russian writers.

Virginia Woolf’s Portraits of Russian Writers

Virginia Woolf’s Portraits of Russian Writers PDF

Author: Darya Protopopova

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-02-05

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1527527824

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Virginia Woolf always stayed ahead of her time. Championing gender equality when women could not vote; publishing authors from Pakistan, France, Austria and other parts of the world, while nationalism in Britain was on the rise; and befriending outcasts and social pariahs. As such, what could have possibly interested her in the works of nineteenth-century Russian writers, austere and, at times, misogynistic thinkers preoccupied with peasants, priests, and paroxysms of the soul? This study explains the chronological and cultural paradox of how classic Russian fiction became crucial to Woolf’s vision of British modernism. We follow Woolf as she begins to learn Russian, invents a character for a story by Dostoevsky, ponders over Sophia Tolstoy’s suicide note, and proclaims Chekhov a truly ‘modern’ writer. The book also examines British modernists’ fascination with Russian art, looking at parallels between Roger Fry’s articles on Russian Post-Impressionists and Woolf’s essays on Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain PDF

Author: George Saunders

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1984856049

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Town & Country, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist, BookPage • “[A] worship song to writers and readers.”—Oprah Daily For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

The Common Reader

The Common Reader PDF

Author: Virginia Woolf

Publisher: Bibliotech Press

Published: 1925

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13:

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A far cry from her wistful and introspective fiction, Woolf's essays on literature read as lively, droll, and conversational. These essays focus on famous literary figures as well as the craft of fiction; written in confident but inviting prose designed specifically for what Woolf called the common reader, they interweave biography, wit, social commentary, and literary analysis. Woolf typically seems disinterested in offering definitive arguments or reaching grand conclusions. She instead concerns herself with viewing a given writer or topic from several interpretive angles so that she might reveal as much about her subject as she can in a single essay, to a broad audience consisting of non-academic readers. Favorite essays included "Notes on an Elizabethan Play," "Modern Fiction," "Outlines," and "How it Strikes a Contemporary." (Michael)

Virginia Woolf's Common Reader

Virginia Woolf's Common Reader PDF

Author: Katerina Koutsantoni

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-11

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1317001575

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In the first comprehensive study of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader, Katerina Koutsantoni draws on theorists from the fields of sociology, sociolinguistics, philosophy, and literary criticism to investigate the thematic pattern underpinning these books with respect to the persona of the 'common reader'. Though these two volumes are the only ones that Woolf compiled herself, they have seldom been considered as a whole. As a result, what they reveal about Woolf's position with regard to the processes of writing, reading, and critical analysis has not been fully examined. Koutsantoni challenges the critical commonplace that equates Woolf's strategy of self-effacement and personal removal from her works as a necessary compromise that allowed her to achieve authorial recognition in a male-dominated context. Rather, Koutsantoni argues that an investigation of impersonality in Woolf's essays reveals the potential of the genre to function both as a vehicle for the subjective and dialogic expression of the author and reader and as a venue for exploring topics with which the ordinary reader can relate. As she explores and challenges the meaning of impersonality in Woolf's Common Reader, Koutsantoni shows how the related issues of subjectivity, authority, reader-response, intersubjectivity, and dialogism offer useful perspectives from which to examine Woolf's work.

A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own PDF

Author: Virginia Woolf

Publisher: Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd

Published: 2023-03-07

Total Pages: 123

ISBN-13: 9356843384

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A Room of One’s Own is an essay written by Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1929 and is based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at two colleges for women at Cambridge. In this famous essay, Woolf addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular. In this essay, the author also asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. According to Woolf, women’s creativity has been curtailed due to centuries of prejudice and financial and educational disadvantages. To emphasize her view, she offers the example of an imaginary gifted but uneducated sister of William Shakespeare, who, discouraged from all eventually kills herself. Woolf celebrates the work of women who have overcome that tradition and become writers, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. In the final section Woolf suggests that great minds are neutral and argues that intellectual freedom requires financial freedom. The author entreats her audience to write not only fiction but poetry, criticism, and scholarly works as well.

Orlando

Orlando PDF

Author: Virginia Woolf

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2012-07-31

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1448139023

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Virginia Woolf's most unusual and fantastic creation, a funny, exuberant tale that examines the very nature of sexuality. WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY PETER ACKROYD AND MARGARET REYNOLDS As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will not only witness the making of history from its edge, but will find that his unique position as a woman who knows what it is to be a man will give him insight into matters of the heart. The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Reynolds, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. **One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Virginia Woolf in Context

Virginia Woolf in Context PDF

Author: Bryony Randall

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-12-17

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 110700361X

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Covering a wide range of historical, theoretical, critical and cultural contexts, this collection studies key issues in contemporary Woolf studies.

Russomania

Russomania PDF

Author: Rebecca Beasley

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 0192522485

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Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism provides a new account of modernist literature's emergence in Britain. British writers played a central role in the dissemination of Russian literature and culture during the early twentieth century, and their writing was transformed by the encounter. This study restores the thick history of that moment, by analyzing networks of dissemination and reception to recover the role of neglected as well as canonical figures, and institutions as well as individuals. The dominant account of British modernism privileges a Francophile genealogy, but the turn-of-the century debate about the future of British writing was a triangular debate, a debate not only between French and English models, but between French, English, and Russian models. Francophile modernists associated Russian literature, especially the Tolstoyan novel, with an uncritical immersion in 'life' at the expense of a mastery of style, and while individual works might be admired, Russian literature as a whole was represented as a dangerous model for British writing. This supposed danger was closely bound up with the politics of the period, and this book investigates how Russian culture was deployed in the close relationships between writers, editors, and politicians who made up the early twentieth-century intellectual class—the British intelligentsia. Russomania argues that the most significant impact of Russian culture is not to be found in stylistic borrowings between canonical authors, but in the shaping of the major intellectual questions of the period: the relation between language and action, writer and audience, and the work of art and lived experience. The resulting account brings an occluded genealogy of early modernism to the fore, with a different arrangement of protagonists, different critical values, and stronger lines of connection to the realist experiments of the Victorian past, and the anti-formalism and revived romanticism of the 1930s and 1940s future.