Woolf’s Ambiguities: Tonal Modernism, Narrative Strategy, Feminist Precursors - Hardcover

Hite, Molly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501714457 ISBN 13: 9781501714450

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2017

Synopsis

In a book that compares Virginia Woolf's writing with that of the novelist, actress, and feminist activist Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952), Molly Hite explores the fascinating connections between Woolf's aversion to women's "pleading a cause" in fiction and her narrative technique of complicating, minimizing, or omitting tonal cues. Hite shows how A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Voyage Out borrow from and implicitly criticize Robins's work.

Hite presents and develops the concept of narrative tone as a means to enrich and complicate our readings of Woolf's modernist novels. In Woolf's Ambiguities, she argues that the greatest formal innovation in Woolf's fiction is the muting, complicating, or effacing of textual pointers guiding how readers feel and make ethical judgments about characters and events. Much of Woolf's narrative prose, Hite proposes, thus refrains from endorsing a single position, not only adding value ambiguity to the cognitive ambiguity associated with modernist fiction generally, but explicitly rejecting the polemical intent of feminist novelists in the generation preceding her own. Hite also points out that Woolf reconsidered her rejection of polemical fiction later in her career. In the unfinished draft of her "essay-nove;" The Pargiters, Woolf created a brilliant new narrative form allowing her to make unequivocal value judgments.

About this title

About the Author:

Molly Hite is Emerita Professor of English at Cornell University. She is the author of The Other Side of the Story, also from Cornell, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, and two novels.

Review:

"An invaluable contribution to Woolf studies, offering provocative insights of specific texts and a way to read her formal experiments and revisions as part of an ethicoaesthetic strategy that she deployed across her entire oeuvre."

(Woolf Studies Annual)

"A hugely persuasive account of Woolf's textual originality... an elegant, well-researched monorgraph that makes a significant contribution to Woolf studies."

(Virginia Woolf Bulletin)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501714457
• ISBN 13: 9781501714450
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 244