690 Result(s)
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Literature
British and Irish Literature
Literary History
Twentieth-Century Literature
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Ireland
Biographical information on Iris Murdoch usually begins with the fact that she was born in Dublin. She presented — and to some extent misrepresented — herself as Anglo-Irish. Murdoch was indeed born in Dublin,...
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Nora and Marthe
The first two chapters of this study—focusing on Nora Barnacle and Marthe Fleischmann, and Katharine and Charles Stewart Parnell—will provide openings, however brief, into crucial moments and key players for J...
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Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein: Commerce, Bestsellers, and the Jew
As a result of Edith Sitwell’s encouragement and enthusiasm, Gertrude Stein agreed to lecture at Cambridge and Oxford in June 1926. In the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her delivery of “Composition as Explana...
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Early Life
Iris Murdoch’s literary life began publicly in 1932 when, at 13 years old, she won one of the first two open scholarships to the liberal and high-minded Badminton School in Bristol. Her fledgling literary work...
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The “Keystone Public” and Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own, Time and Tide, and Cultural Hierarchies
On 23 October 1929, the eve of its publication, Virginia Woolf voiced concern over the reception of A Room of One’s Own. In her diary she worried that there was “a shrill feminine tone in it which [her] intimate ...
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The “Grand Lady of Literature ”: Virginia Woolf in Italy under Fascism
Even though Fascism was a harsh and patriarchal dictatorship notorious for its strong nationalism, raised barriers and censored press, there were forums in Fascist Italy where Italian and foreign literatures c...
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Appropriating Virginia Woolf for the New Humanism: Seward Collins and The Bookman, 1927–1933
Virginia Woolf’s frequent contributions to several American magazines, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, form a side of her writing life influenced by financial concerns, since American magazines paid more ...
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Afterlife
Iris Murdoch spent her last days at Vale House in Oxford and died there on 8 February 1999 with her husband at her side. Such was her stature in British letters that the BBC evening news gave her death precede...
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Circulating Ideas and Selling Periodicals: Leonard Woolf, the Nation and Athenaeum, and Topical Debat
Throughout their careers as authors, journalists, and publishers, Virginia and Leonard Woolf wrote and published hundreds of books, reviews, articles, and essays that might be considered polemical, whether the...
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Virginia Woolf and the Middlebrow Market of the Familiar Essay
In “Middlebrow,” Virginia Woolf attacked the category of the “Broadbrow,” defended by J. B. Priestley in a talk on the BBC (Priestley, “High”).1 As Melba Cuddy-Keane has shown, Woolf posited her “democratic highb...
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Woolf Studies and Periodical Studies
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?” fo...
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After the War
In the 1950s, when Murdoch’s novels began to be published, the literary context was largely non-theoretical and untheorized. Much English writing of the fifties displayed a modest or chauvinistic insularity. T...
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“Murdering an Aunt or Two”: Textual Practice and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf’s Metropolitan Market
As evidence for the multiple connections between the commercial and intellectual freedoms provided by the Hogarth Press for its co-owner and leading author, consider a diary entry from September 1925: ...
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Translating Orlando in 1930s Fascist Italy: Virginia Woolf, Arnoldo Mondadori, and Alessandra Scalero
The first full translation of Orlando in Italian was published on 1 October 1933 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore in the prestigious Medusa collection, a series aimed at presenting “the great novelists of every count...
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The Love Machine
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Murdoch was still uncertain about the path her career was to take. Undaunted in her desire to write more plays, she was still finding it difficult (Peggy Ramsey read Joanna, Joa...
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Don’t Judge a Cover by Its Woolf: Book Cover Images and the Marketing of Virginia Woolf’s Work
We all judge books by their covers. Browsing in unfamiliar stacks, we are attracted to a book by a name, title, aesthetic, or familiar image on its cover. When we encounter books we already know or have read, ...
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The Late Novels
The last 15 years of Murdoch’s writing life brought their share of triumphs and disappointments. Philosophically she appeared to struggle: her audience shrank during her 1982 Gifford Lectures and in 1992 her p...
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Odyssean Culture and Its Discontents
This passage introduces Arthur Asa Berger’s student guide to the cultural analysis of everyday life; subsequent chapters explore the semiotics of the clock radio, king-sized beds, comforters, and so forth, sug...
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Riddling the Reader to Write Back
My thesis here is that some modernist writers, and, preeminently, Joyce in Ulysses, create a new relationship to the reader by not only inviting the reader’s participation in the literary act (which is itself a d...
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Beyond the Margins of Marriage in Exiles and Giacomo Joyce
The story of the Parnells casts the adulterous liaison as a site where the two understand the alterity of the other: “a relationship,” Levinas writes, “whose positivity comes from remoteness, from separation, ...
