Harcourt is proud to introduce new annotated editions of three Virginia Woolf classics, ideal for the college classroom and beyond. For the first time, students reading these books will have the resources at hand to help them understand the text as well as the reasons and methods behind Woolf's writing. We've commissioned the best-known Woolf scholars in the field to provide invaluable introductions, editing, critical analysis, and suggestions for further reading. These much-awaited volumes are the first of many annotated Woolf editions Harcourt plans on publishing in the coming years.
This brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life. Direct and vivid in her account of the details of Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for a party she is to give that evening, Woolf ultimately managed to reveal much more; for it is the feeling behind these daily events that gives Mrs. Dalloway its texture and richness and makes it so memorable.
Annotated and with an introduction by Bonnie Scott

Modernism, whether seen as a period designation, a manifestation of formal experimentation, or an aspect of modernity, has since its inception been marked, consciously or unconsciously, by gender. The dates 1890-1940, typically accepted as encompassing the modernist period, coincide with the first wave of feminism and its educational, suffragist, socialist, and professional agendas. Feminist activism and ideology of the period, as well as reactions against them, made gender a field of contention, sometimes labelled the "sex wars." The long shadow left by the Oscar Wilde trials, and the flourishing of gay and lesbian cultures, particularly in the urban centres of modernism in the teens and twenties, also queered normative notions of masculinity and femininity. In response to global consumer culture, diverse images of the modern girl emerged, also putting conventional notions of gender to the test. The Harlem Renaissance had its own gendered politics and expressions, as did modernism's venturing into and emergence from colonial situations around the globe. The discussion of gender in modernism arose in the 1970s, along with the second wave of feminism and the introduction of feminist theory and criticism to the academy. It challenged the ways that the modernist canon, and the experimental forms associated with modernism, had been fashioned as normatively male. Early on, various approaches to the exploration of gender were available, including the gendering of style available in French Feminist theory, psychoanalytic approaches, materialist feminism, and gyno-critical attention to women writers. Raising questions of gender concerning modernist texts had become an expectation by the 1990s. Debates about the adequacy of gender as the central concern of feminist theory have led to the useful concept of intersectionality, which heeds the ways that other social categories, such as race, class, sexuality, dis/ability, and global/colonial location, intersect with gender in creating the standpoint of an individual. Equally valuable are challenges to binary divisions encouraged by gendered oppositions, and the study of ways that gender is produced by culture or performed.

Gender in Modernism, conceived as a sequel to the now-classic volume The Gender of Modernism, selects the best from the fifteen years of feminist literary and modernist scholarship that has appeared since the original's publication. Its fresh and diverse texts examine new themes and reflect today's broader, more inclusive understanding of modernism. The collection's modernist works have been grouped into twenty-one thematic sections, with theoretical introductions to the primary texts provided by the scholars who have taken the lead in pushing both modernism and gender in new directions. The selections enhance our understanding of the complex intersections of gender with a large array of social identifications, including global location, ideas of race, passing, the queering of sexualities, medicine, and experiences of trauma and war. It sees continental modernism in a different light, and moves on to colonial and postcolonial sites. less-studied genres of modernism, including writers on the left, suffragists, authors of manifestos, mediums, authors dismissed as sentimental, artists, dancers, dramatists, and filmmakers. Gender in Modernism will quickly move from resource to springboard, furthering modernist study well into the twenty-first century. Contributors include Tuzyline Jita Allan, Ann Ardis, Nancy Berke, Julia Briggs, Pamela L. Caughie, Mary Chapman, Suzanne Clark, Patrick Collier, Diane F. Gillespie, Barbara Green, Leslie Kathleen Hankins, Suzette A. Henke, Katherine Kelly, Colleen Lamos, Bette London, Janet Lyon, Jayne Marek, Sonita Sarker, Carol Shloss, Susan Squier, Claire Tylee, and Gay Wachman.

"This is the book we've been waiting for: a distinguished collectionthat demonstrates how revisions of Modernist definitions might proceed.... TheGender of Modernism... will be nothing less than an absolutely necessary text forModernist studies." -- Shari Benstock

"Scott and hercontributing editors... effectively [bring] together the issues of gender andmodernism into a volume recommended for reference and classroom use." -- James JoyceLiterary Supplement

..". a treasure trove for anyoneinterested in the literature and history of modern times." -- SusanGubar

Authors included are: Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, NancyCunard, H.D., T.S. Eliot, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Nella Larsen, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, Rose Macaulay, Hugh MacDiarmid, KatherineMansfield, Charlotte Mew, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jean Rhys, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, Antonia White, Anna Wickham, and Virginia Woolf.

From the time that George Bernard Shaw remarked that "Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely", West's writings and her politics have elicited strong reactions. This collection of her letters -- the first ever published -- has been culled from the estimated ten thousand she wrote during her long life. The more than two hundred selected letters follow this spirited author, critic, and journalist from her first feminist campaign for women's suffrage when she was a teenager through her reassessments of the twentieth century written in 1982, in her ninetieth year.

The letters, which are presented in full, include correspondence with West's famous lover H. G. Wells and with Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Emma Goldman, Noel Coward, and many others; offer pronouncements on such contemporary authors as Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and provide new insights into her battles against misogyny, fascism, and communism. West deliberately fashions her own biography through this intensely personal correspondence, challenging rival accounts of her groundbreaking professional career, her frustrating love life, and her tormented family relations. Engrossing to read, the collection sheds new light on this important figure and her social and literary milieu.