Virginia Woolf, Literary Materiality, and Feminist Aesthetics

This book interrogates the relationship between the material conditions of Woolf's writing practices and her work as a printer and publisher at the Hogarth Press. In bringing to light her embodied literary processes, from drafting and composition to hand-printing and binding, this study foregrounds the interactions between Woolf's modernist experimentation and the visual and material aspects of her printed works. By drawing on the field of print culture, as well as the materialist turn in Woolf scholarship, it explores how her experience in print, book-design and publishing underlines her experimental writing, and how her literary texts are conditioned by the context of their production. This book, therefore, provides new ways of reading Woolf's modernism in the context of twentieth-century print, material, and visual cultures. By suggesting that Woolf's work at the Hogarth Press sensitized her to the significant role the visual aspects of a text play in its system ofrepresentation, it also considers the extent to which materiality informs both her work, as well as her engagement with Bloomsbury formalist aesthetics, which often exaggerate the distinction between visual and verbal modes of expression.

Provides an in-depth exploration of how literary materiality informs Woolf's modernist aesthetics Highlights the connections between the material context of production and the literary text Argues that Woolf develops a feminist theory of aesthetic form underlined by her engagement with literary production

Autorentext
Amber Jenkins is an independent scholar. She graduated with a PhD in English Literature from Cardiff University, UK in 2019. Since then, she has taught modernist literature at Cardiff, and has continued to publish her research on Virginia Woolf. She has also worked at the University of South Wales, exploring how civic engagement can enhance scholarly practice and promote cultural democracy.

Klappentext

This book interrogates the relationship between the material conditions of Woolf's writing practices and her work as a printer and publisher at the Hogarth Press. In bringing to light her embodied literary processes, from drafting and composition to hand-printing and binding, this study foregrounds the interactions between Woolf's modernist experimentation and the visual and material aspects of her printed works. By drawing on the field of print culture, as well as the materialist turn in Woolf scholarship, it explores how her experience in print, book-design and publishing underlines her experimental writing, and how her literary texts are conditioned by the context of their production. This book, therefore, provides new ways of reading Woolf's modernism in the context of twentieth-century print, material, and visual cultures. By suggesting that Woolf's work at the Hogarth Press sensitized her to the significant role the visual aspects of a text play in its system ofrepresentation, it also considers the extent to which materiality informs both her work, as well as her engagement with Bloomsbury formalist aesthetics, which often exaggerate the distinction between visual and verbal modes of expression.

Inhalt
Part I: Materiality.- 1. Introduction: Writing, Materiality, and Aesthetics.- 2. Conversations in Colour and Ink: Feminist Aesthetics in 'The Mark on the Wall' and Kew Gardens.- 3. 'Fill in the sketch as you like': Developing the Fragmentary Form of Jacob's Room.- 4. 'The cold raw edge of one's relinquished pages': Reading Mrs Dalloway as a Palimpsest.- Part II. Aesthetics.- 5. Drafting Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe: Feminist Aesthetics in the Manuscript of To the Lighthouse.- 6. 'A succession of semblances': Form and Feminism in The Waves.- 7. 'Getting the past to shadow this broken surface': Time, Materiality, and Aesthetics.