Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives

The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama

Monica Latham (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

250 Seiten

2023
Routledge (Verlag)
978-0-367-55073-8 (ISBN)

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This book explores Virginia Woolf’s afterlives in contemporary biographical novels and drama. It offers an extensive analysis of a wide array of literary productions in which Virginia Woolf appears as a fictional character or a dramatis persona. It examines how Woolf’s physical and psychological features, as well as the values she stood for, are magnified, reinforced or distorted to serve the authors’ specific agendas. Beyond general theoretical issues about this flourishing genre, this study raises specific questions about the literary and cultural relevance of Woolf’s fictional representations. These contemporary narratives inform us about Woolf’s iconicity, but they also mirror our current literary, cultural and political concerns. Based on a close examination of twenty-five works published between 1972 and 2019, the book surveys various portraits of Woolf as a feminist, pacifist, troubled genius, gifted innovative writer, treacherous, competitive sister and tragic, suicidal character, or, on the contrary, as a caricatural comic spirit, inspirational figure and perspicacious amateur sleuth. By resurrecting Virginia Woolf in contemporary biofiction, whether to enhance or debunk stereotypes about the historical figure, the authors studied here contribute to her continuous reinvention. Their diverse fictional portraits constitute a way to reinforce Woolf’s literary status, re-evaluate her work, rejuvenate critical interpretations and augment her cultural capital in the twenty-first century

Monica Latham is a Professor of British literature at the English Department of the Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France, and a specialist of Virginia Woolf and genetic criticism. She obtained a PhD in 2003 from Université de Nancy, France. Her thesis analysed the genesis of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, and was entitled ‘De Melymbrosia (1908) à The Voyage Out (1915): l’invention allotropique du projet woolfien d’écriture’. Since then, Latham has published over sixty articles on modernist and postmodernist authors in many international journals and academic publications. She is the author of A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs Dalloway (2015). She is the co-editor of the series ‘Book Practices and Textual Itineraries’, ‘Biofiction Studies’ and ‘Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks’.

Introduction: ‘I Have Been Dead and Yet Am Now Alive Again’: Catching the Phantom

Biography, fiction and biofiction: from ‘bastard’ to ‘hybrid’

Visions and designs

Postmodernist truthful (mis)representations

From truthful fictions to travesties of truth

Goals and perspectives

Chapter 1: Bioplay(giarism)s

The ‘little cut-and-paste job’

‘The play’s the thing’

Virginia’s feminist companions

The last song of the nightingale

Virginia and Vita: a year in love

Chapter 2: Detecting Woolf

In the shadow of WWI: Virginia as a feminist sleuth

Who killed Virginia Woolf? The Cambridge Five!

Chapter 3: Virginia’s Daughters

Virginia’s long shadow

Virginia’s biological progeny

Chapter 4: Vanessa and Virginia

A tale of two sisters

Vanessa and her sister: ‘twinned always’

Vanessa and Virginia: ‘psychically Siamese’

Vanessa and Virginia: a biofictional spin-off

Chapter 5: Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms

Riding the ‘Dark Mare’ at ‘sixty’s gate’

Adeline and Virginia

Mandril and the marmoset

Chapter 6: Biofictive Mirrors: Clarissa Woolf / Virginia Dalloway

A cameo appearance

Mrs Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Brown: death, birth and survival

Chapter 7: Bloomsberries Reimagined

Lytton and Virginia

Variable geometries: squares, circles and triangles

Bloomsbury legacies

Conclusion: Posthumous Lives: ‘I Am Made and Remade Continually’

Biographical Woolfs and fictional Virginias

A summing-up of Woolf’s afterlives

Biofiction as critical interpretation

Virginia Woolf legend: keeping the myth alive

Erscheinungsdatum	22.12.2022
Reihe/Serie	Routledge Auto/Biography Studies
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	376 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-367-55073-3 / 0367550733
ISBN-13	978-0-367-55073-8 / 9780367550738
Zustand	Neuware