Browsing by Author "Wood, Alice"
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Item Metadata only Item Metadata only Creating and Reflecting Desire: Interwar Magazines and Advertising(AM Digital, 2022-03-01) Wood, AliceItem Open Access The development of Virginia Woolf’s late cultural criticism, 1930-1941(De Montfort University, 2010) Wood, AliceThis thesis explores the development of Virginia Woolf’s late cultural criticism. While contemporary scholars commonly observe that Woolf shifted her intellectual focus from modernist fiction to cultural criticism in the 1930s, there has been little sustained examination of why and how Woolf’s late cultural criticism evolved during 1930-1941. This thesis aims to contribute just such an investigation to field. My approach here fuses a feminist-historicist approach with the methodology of genetic criticism (critique génétique), a French school of textual studies that traces the evolution of literary works through their compositional histories. Reading across published and unpublished texts in Woolf’s oeuvre, my genetic, feminist-historicist analysis of Woolf emphasises that her late cultural criticism developed from her early feminist politics and dissident aesthetic stance as well as in response to the tempestuous historical circumstances of 1930-1941. As a prelude to my investigation of Woolf’s late output, Chapter 1 traces the genesis of Woolf’s cultural criticism in her early biographical writings. Chapter 2 then scrutinises Woolf’s late turn to cultural criticism through six essays she produced for Good Housekeeping in 1931. Chapter 3 surveys the evolution of Woolf’s critique of patriarchy in Three Guineas (1938) through the voluminous pre-publication documents that link this innovative feminist-pacifist pamphlet to The Years (1937). Finally, Chapter 4 outlines how Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), fuses fiction with cultural criticism to debate art’s social role in times of national crisis. The close relationship between formal and political radicalism in Woolf’s late cultural criticism, I conclude, undermines the integrity of viewing Woolf’s oeuvre in two distinct phases –the modernist 1920s and the socially-engaged 1930s – and suggests the danger of using such labels in wider narratives of interwar literature. Woolf’s late cultural criticism, this thesis argues, developed from rather than rejected her earlier experimentalism.Item Metadata only Facing Life as We Have Known It: Virginia Woolf and the Women's Co-operative Guild.(Manchester University Press, 2014-09-01) Wood, AliceThis article explores Leonard and Virginia Woolf's early interactions with the Women's Co-operative Guild and supplies a contextualised analysis of Virginia Woolf's preface to Life as We Have Known It (1931). Written to introduce a volume of autobiographical sketches by Co-operative Guildswomen and published in a variant form in the Yale Review, this essay has generated conflicting debate in Woolf studies. In this article I argue that the essay fictionalises Virginia Woolf's relationship with the Guild, concealing her familiarity with Guild activities to better engage an anticipated middle-class readership and promote frank interrogation of class prejudice.Item Open Access Fiction for the Woman of To-day: The Modern Short Story in Eve(Edinburgh University Press, 2021-03) Wood, AliceThis chapter explores short fiction published in Eve, later Eve: The Lady's Pictorial, a magazine directed to 'the woman of to-day and tomorrow' in print between 1921-29. This elite English women's paper was avowedly modern in outlook - debating new social roles for women, new ideas about psychology and sexuality, changing relations between the sexes and modernist aesthetics - at the same time as upholding traditional values such as respect for class hierachy and marriage within its routine content of society gossip columns, fashion pages, travel writing and reviews of new books, art exhibitions and theatre. This chpater shows how the tension between modernisty and convention was also reflected in the magazine's short stories, which ranged from formulaic and conservative plots to experimental and subversive narratives. It reads stories by familiar and forgoteen authors, including Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce Anstruther, Marthe Troly-Curtin and Radclyffe Hall, that, in more or less radical ways, probed new models of femininity and new models for heterosexual relationships.Item Open Access 'Housekeeping, Citizenship, and Nationhood in Good Housekeeping and Modern Home'(Edinburgh University Press, 2018-01-01) Wood, AliceThis article interrogates the framing of women as citizens through domestic work in two interwar women's magazines. Directed towards an aspirational lower-middle-class female audience, George Newnes's Modern Home identified homemaking as women's chief role and service to the nation and explicitly addressed its readers as English or British citizens. The National Magazine's Company's Good Housekeeping was solidly middle class in outlook with an undertone of internationalism in the interwar period. This magazine conversely insisted on women's citizenship both within and outside the home and urged its housekeeping readers to consider their values, responsibilities and potential power as citizens in international as well as national terms.Item Metadata only Late Works (1933-1941)(Oxford University Press, 2021-08) Wood, AliceItem Metadata only Made to Measure: Virginia Woolf in Good Housekeeping Magazine.(Taylor and Francis, 2010) Wood, AliceVirginia Woolf welcomed not only the economic rewards of her 37-year career as book reviewer and critic but also the multiple opportunities journalism presented for traversing and challenging the cultural boundaries of the literary market. This article focuses on a series of six articles Woolf contributed to the British edition of Good Housekeeping in 1931. Inconsistencies in the social critique of these essays, posthumously collected as The London Scene, are often explained with the supposition that Woolf was forced to trivialize her writing in anticipation of her middlebrow Good Housekeeping audience. Careful examination of Good Housekeeping’s origins, outlook and routine content in the 1920s and early 1930s reveals, however, that Woolf’s feminist analysis of patriarchal London in this series was pertinently addressed to the predominantly female, middle-class readers of this popular women’s magazine, whose interests and concerns were far more diverse than are often assumed.Item Metadata only Magazines, Movements, Modernism(Taylor & Francis, 2020-03-26) Wood, AliceItem Metadata only Modernism and Modernity in British Women's Magazines(Routledge, 2020-07-07) Wood, AliceThis book explores responses to the strangeness and pleasures of modernism and modernity in four commercial British women’s magazines of the interwar period. Through extensive study of interwar Vogue (UK), Eve, Good Housekeeping (UK), and Harper’s Bazaar (UK), Wood uncovers how modernism was received and disseminated by these fashion and domestic periodicals and recovers experimental journalism and fiction within them by an array of canonical and marginalized writers, including Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. The book’s analysis is attentive to text and image and to interactions between editorial, feature, and advertising material. Its detailed survey of these largely neglected magazines reveals how they situated radical aesthetics in relation to modernity’s broader new challenges, diversions, and opportunities for women, and how they approached high modernist art and literature through discourses of fashion and celebrity. Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines extends recent research into modernism’s circulation through diverse markets and publication outlets and adds to the substantial body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between modernism and popular culture. It demonstrates that commercial women’s magazines subversively disrupted and sustained contemporary hierarchies of high and low culture as well as actively participating in the construction of modernism’s public profile.Item Metadata only Modernism and the Middlebrow in British Women's Magazines, 1916-1930(Brill Rodopi, 2016-03) Wood, AliceItem Open Access Item Open Access Modernism, Exclusivity, and the Sophisticated Public of Harper's Bazaar (UK)(Edinburgh University Press, 2016-11) Wood, AliceThis article explores the reciprocal relationship between modernism and Harper’s Bazaar (UK) during 1929-35. In its early years this commercial fashion magazine exploited modernism’s perceived exclusivity and highbrow status to flatteringly construct its aspirational readers as culturally sophisticated. Whether printing modernist texts or artworks or parodying their experimental style, early Harper’s Bazaar (UK) promoted the reception of modernist writers and artists as high cultural celebrities, whose presence in the magazine enhanced its cultural value. While insisting on the exclusivity of modernist art and literature, Harper’s Bazaar (UK) simultaneously facilitated the mainstreaming of modernism by commodifying modernist texts and artworks and teaching its readers how to approach them. During the early 1930s, this article argues, Harper’s Bazaar (UK) helped to establish early narratives of modernism’s origins and development while marketing modernism as a desirable, high-end cultural product to its fashion-conscious audience.Item Metadata only 'A New Mimesis': Approaches to Representation in the Poetry of the New York School(Wiley, 2006-05) Wood, AliceAlthough the New York School of Poets opposed reception as a unified artistic movement, study of a selection of their early poetry illustrates that John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler all shared a concern with developing new techniques of representation. This essay argues that much of their experimentation was motivated by a desire to communicate personal experience in poetry without clarification or analysis, and so to depict the self without elevating the significance of the individual.Item Metadata only Review of Clara Jones, Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist (Edinburgh UP, 2015)(Sage, 2016-11) Wood, AliceVirginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist makes an important and exciting contribution to the ongoing critical reassessment of the politics of a writer frequently portrayed as apolitical in her lifetime and for several decades after her death in 1941. In an early critical study, David Daiches argued that ‘Virginia Woolf remained on the whole outside politics, content to justify her position implicitly and unanswerably by her creative work’. Since the late 1970s, critics have steadily dismantled this image of Woolf as an isolated aesthete by exposing her novels’ critiques of patriarchy, imperialism and fascism, and the social and political commentary of her essays, letters, diary and unpublished writings. Yet, the perception of Woolf as standing outside of organised politics persists, in large part due to her own numerous statements of suspicion, distrust and distaste towards formalised social and political organisations. Critics have long known of Woolf’s 1910 letter to Janet Case offering to address envelopes for the suffrage campaign, for example, or her role in arranging speakers for the Richmond branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild; but these activities and others have often been seen as reluctant or sceptical concessions to social and political work. The details of Woolf’s involvement in such activities have received remarkably little attention. Clara Jones’s book significantly addresses this omission by uncovering the circumstances and particularities of Woolf’s participation in four social and political organisations: Morley College, the People’s Suffrage Federation, the Women’s Co-operative Guild and the National Federation of Women’s Institutes. From this research a new portrait emerges of Woolf as activist, if profoundly ambivalent in that activism and highly sensitive to the competing impulses of altruism, egoism, philanthropy and didacticism commonly at play within social and political movements. This book rescues Woolf’s ambivalent activism from obscurity and places it side-by-side with her writing. In addition, through its careful historical research, it offers fresh perspectives on a series of twentieth-century institutions and campaigns. (Extract from item. For full text please see published review at: http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/laha/25/2)Item Metadata only Item Metadata only Review of Natasha Periyan, The Politics of 1930s British Literature: Education, Class, Gender. Historicizing Modernism(Cambridge University Press, 2019-07-26) Wood, AliceItem Metadata only Review of The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture, ed. Celia Marshik (CUP, 2015)(Modern Humanities Research Association, 2016-07) Wood, AliceItem Metadata only Review of Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. Anne E. Fernald(2016) Wood, AliceItem Metadata only Virginia Woolf's "Two Women", or, "The Wrong Way of Reading"(Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2011) Wood, AliceThis paper reads Virginia Woolf’s ‘Two Women,’ a 1927 review of two biographical works, in relation to A Room of One’s Own (1928) and ‘The Wrong Way of Reading,’ a short biographical review from 1920. Woolf’s sustained enquiry into the historical repression of middle-class women in ‘Two Women’ closely anticipates her investigation into the socio-economic obstacles that have stifled women writers in A Room of One’s Own. Following the unorthodox approach to reading biography that she set out in ‘The Wrong Way of Reading,’ Woolf adapts her sources in ‘Two Women,' and again when re-reading this material in A Room of One’s Own, in order to emphasise her feminist critique. Woolf’s willingness to manipulate biographical documents to suit her critical purpose indicates her subversive attitude to the authority of fact and reflects her position as a feminist reader and critic.