"Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde" traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father's library and in Bloomsbury's London extension of Cambridge, Virginia Woolf came of age in the prewar decades, when progressive political and social movements gave hope that Europe "might really be on the brink of becoming civilized," as Leonard Woolf put it. For pacifist Bloomsbury, heir to Europe's unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace -- and, in E. M. Forster's words, "the only genuine "movement" in English civilization" -- the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarities within Europe: belligerent nationalisms, rapacious racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems, a tragic and unnecessary war that mobilized sixty-five million and left thirty-seven million casualties. An avant-garde in the twentieth-century struggle against the violence within European civilization, Bloomsbury and Woolf contributed richly to interwar debates on Europe's future at a moment when democracy's triumph over fascism and communism was by no means assured.

Woolf honed her public voice in dialogue with contemporaries in and beyond Bloomsbury -- John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry to Sigmund Freud (published by the Woolfs'Hogarth Press), Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and many others -- and her works embody and illuminate the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought. An ambitious history of her writings in relation to important currents in British intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century, this book explores Virginia Woolf's narrative journey from her first novel, "The Voyage Out," through her last, "Between the Acts."

"Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde" traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father's library and in Bloomsbury's London extension of Cambridge, Virginia Woolf came of age in the prewar decades, when progressive political and social movements gave hope that Europe "might really be on the brink of becoming civilized," as Leonard Woolf put it. For pacifist Bloomsbury, heir to Europe's unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace -- and, in E. M. Forster's words, "the only genuine "movement" in English civilization" -- the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarities within Europe: belligerent nationalisms, rapacious racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems, a tragic and unnecessary war that mobilized sixty-five million and left thirty-seven million casualties. An avant-garde in the twentieth-century struggle against the violence within European civilization, Bloomsbury and Woolf contributed richly to interwar debates on Europe's future at a moment when democracy's triumph over fascism and communism was by no means assured.

Woolf honed her public voice in dialogue with contemporaries in and beyond Bloomsbury -- John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry to Sigmund Freud (published by the Woolfs'Hogarth Press), Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and many others -- and her works embody and illuminate the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought. An ambitious history of her writings in relation to important currents in British intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century, this book explores Virginia Woolf's narrative journey from her first novel, "The Voyage Out," through her last, "Between the Acts."

New essays and creative explorations of the friendship, milieu and writings of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf 'I love to think of you, Virginia, as my friend ... pray consider how rare it is to find someone with the same passion for writing, who desires to be scrupulously truthful - and to give you the freedom of the city without any reserves at all.' Katherine Mansfield's ardent overture to Virginia Woolf launched a historic friendship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with wary misunderstandings, rivalry and envy. These comparative essays explore the shared terrain of these modernist women writers and shed new light on their 'curious & thrilling' literary relationship - absorbing, intimate, distant, secretly critical, competitive, sometimes foundering in 'quicksands' - and its profound impact on their creative imaginations.

New essays and creative explorations of the friendship, milieu and writings of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf 'I love to think of you, Virginia, as my friend ... pray consider how rare it is to find someone with the same passion for writing, who desires to be scrupulously truthful - and to give you the freedom of the city without any reserves at all.' Katherine Mansfield's ardent overture to Virginia Woolf launched a historic friendship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with wary misunderstandings, rivalry and envy. These comparative essays explore the shared terrain of these modernist women writers and shed new light on their 'curious & thrilling' literary relationship - absorbing, intimate, distant, secretly critical, competitive, sometimes foundering in 'quicksands' - and its profound impact on their creative imaginations.

In this provocative study, distinguished scholar Christine Froula argues that James Joyce used his artist-figures' suffering, transgressions, resistance, masquerade, parody, creativity, and play to turn the perversity often laid at his door into a daring critique of his culture. A departure from earlier feminist views of Joyce as misogynist, patriarchal, masochistic, or an inventor of "ecriture feminine, Modernism's Body" allies Joyce's arduous effort to translate his culture's unconscious knowledge into consciousness and conscience with the revolutionary energies of feminism and psychoanalysis.

Froula contends that Joyce retrieves from repression certain psychodynamics of masculinity that Freud and Lacan leave buried -- particularly the profound and far-reaching effects of the son's early identification with the mother. Rethinking Lacan's view of Joyce as a cultural "symptom," she shows how Joyce fashions deliberately symptomatic performances of himself as Daedalus, Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary, Shakespeare, Penelope, and other Western icons and parlays them into a powerful diagnosis of social and cultural institutions.

At once urgently critical and deeply sympathetic to its subject, "Modernism's Body" puts Joyce's radical analysis of masculinity in challenging dialogue with psychoanalysis, feminism, and narrative theory. Its tour-de-force interpretations show how Joyce probes the authority over sexuality and gender wielded by church and state, the marriage system, Nighttown's underworld of phantasmic mother/whores, and the symbolic estates of arts and letters as he excavates the collective conscience to forge it anew.

A study of the work of James Joyce, by feminist scholar Christine Froula, this work is a reading of his critique of the origins and workings of gender in Western culture. It sees Joyce's work as largely self-diagnostic, seeking to discover the masculine psyche of Western culture.