Woolf Studies and Periodical Studies

Abstract

How should one read a periodical? And, more to the point of this volume, how, and why, should one read Virginia Woolf in a periodical? I start by revising Woolf’s titular question “How Should One Read a Book?” for two reasons: first, to borrow the wry defamiliarization Woolf’s title enacts, the way it urges attentiveness to the actual cognitive moves, ordinarily subconscious, that are involved in reading; second, and by substituting “periodical” for “book,” to call attention to Woolf’s own preference for print bound between hard covers-a preference widely shared by her intellectual contemporaries and since naturalized by the academic study of literature.¹ Several factors have made this a propitious time for renewed interest in Woolf’s appearances in periodicals: the material turn in modernist studies and literary study generally, with its emphasis on the “thick descriptions” of cultural context for which periodicals offer such a rich archive; the related emergence of “periodical studies” as a critical subgenre within modernist studies; the anxiety of exhaustion that shadows a scholarly community organized around a single, canonical author’s work.² Thus it seems a good time to borrow the phrasing of a question Woolf did ask in order to pose one that she did not: How should one read a periodical?