Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity

This book provides a fascinating account of rooms in selected works by Virginia Woolf. Casting them as spaces which are at once material, textual and emotional, the volume shows Woolf's rooms to be consistently connected to wider geographies of modernity and therefore central to her writing of gender, class, empire and the nation. The discussion moves in and out of rooms, from the focus on travel in Woolf's debut novel, to the archival function of built space and literary heritage in Night and Day, the university as a male space of learning in Jacob's Room, the iconic A Room of One's Own and its historical readers, interior space as spatial history in The Years, and rooms as loci of memory in her unfinished memoir. Zink masterfully shows the spatial formation of rooms to be at the heart of Woolf's interweaving of the political and the aesthetic, revealing an understanding of space as dynamic and relational.

Engages with Virginia Woolf's fiction, essays, and autobiographical writings Expands the trope of rooms to look at the intersection between textual, physical, and metaphorical meanings of space Connects interiority and space with wider geographies of gender, class, and empire

Autorentext

Suzana Zink is Lecturer at the University of Neuchâtel, a position she has held since 2005. Her teaching experience includes both literature and language courses and her research interests focus on space and place in modernism, especially Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys.

Inhalt

1 Introduction.- 2 Re-Reading the Modern.- 3 Out of Rooms: Imperial Routes and the Impasse of Becoming in The Voyage Out.- 4 Night and Day: Great Men's Rooms and Women's Lives.- 5 Trespassing: Spaces of Learning in Jacob's Room.- 6 The Woman's Room: A Room of One's Own and Its Contemporary Readers.- 7 Writing Spatial History: The Years.- 7 Rooms of Memory: A Sketch of the Past.- 9 Conclusion.