With an Introduction and Notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University,Bakersfield. Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a genuine humanity and a concern with the experiences that both enrich and stultify existence. Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists. Clarissa's life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those of Septimus Warren Smith, whose madness escalates as his life draws toward inevitable suicide.

With an Introduction and Notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University, Bakersfield. Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Costantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

Joseph Conrad and Material Culture offers a fresh approach to Conrad’s work, especially his African fictions, by grounding its discussion in the importance of material culture and its role in shaping the literary art form in modernity. Opening with the description of a uniquely carved African tusk as both a work of art and an object of material culture, Merry M. Pawlowski traces the scenes of African life displayed on that tusk to establish the major themes of her study of selected works of Conrad’s fiction and nonfiction. These themes include the presence of transculturation in colonial Africa, the transformation of the African fetish into the commodity fetish, the exploitation of the African continent through mapping, exploration, and trade, and the rise of the transcendent commodity. Employing cartographic, materialist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial theories as frameworks, Pawlowski offers new insights using details, liminal presences, in Conrad’s texts enhanced by key illustrations to expand those details as revelatory of the broader material culture invoked by the text. The brief mention of a Huntley and Palmers biscuit tin, the single reference to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the intriguing hint of a vile scramble for loot, are a few examples of tantalizing textual presences. Pawlowski explores the presence of material culture through teasing out gaps, silences, and hints deployed in Conrad’s works. Revealing the rich context on which Conrad drew as he wrote, this book offers an opportunity for the reader to enter Conrad’s world through envisioning the defamiliarizing spaces from which he drew inspiration for his art. This book is volume 31 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, edited by Wiesław Krajka.