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Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground : Essays
Eminent feminist critic Gillian Beer's work on Woolf, George Eliot, and Victorian scientific discourse are well known and admired. As the essays in this collection affirm, Beer has an extraordinary command of British cultural history, a talent for interpretative prose, and a gift for pursuing genuinely rewarding questions. In Virginia The Common Ground, Beer's essays on Woolf are brought together for the first time in a single volume.
Through her close investigative textual readings, she demonstrates how Woolf's conceptualizations of history and narrative are intimately bound up with her ways of thinking about women, writing, and social and sexual relations. This is demonstrated through precise, detailed configurations, setting Woolf alongside texts both contemporary and distant, scientific and literary, with the effect that Woolf's writing is illuminated in entirely new and unexpected contexts.
Beer's introduction pulls together the critical themes of her work, and renders Woolf accessible to the large audience of scholars interested in English Literature as well as women's writing.
"In a field that has more than its share of trendy, jargon-ridden, reductive appropriations of Woolf's texts for various easily attainable ends, Beer is a reader who honors the complexities of Woolf's texts while illuminating them; she refuses over and over again to resolve the complex into the simple, to tidy up the contradictions of a given text." --John Whittier-Ferguson, University of Michigan
Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature and President, Clare Hall at University of Cambridge.
Through her close investigative textual readings, she demonstrates how Woolf's conceptualizations of history and narrative are intimately bound up with her ways of thinking about women, writing, and social and sexual relations. This is demonstrated through precise, detailed configurations, setting Woolf alongside texts both contemporary and distant, scientific and literary, with the effect that Woolf's writing is illuminated in entirely new and unexpected contexts.
Beer's introduction pulls together the critical themes of her work, and renders Woolf accessible to the large audience of scholars interested in English Literature as well as women's writing.
"In a field that has more than its share of trendy, jargon-ridden, reductive appropriations of Woolf's texts for various easily attainable ends, Beer is a reader who honors the complexities of Woolf's texts while illuminating them; she refuses over and over again to resolve the complex into the simple, to tidy up the contradictions of a given text." --John Whittier-Ferguson, University of Michigan
Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature and President, Clare Hall at University of Cambridge.
- GenresEssaysLiterary Criticism
183 pages, Paperback
First published November 22, 1996
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About the author
Gillian Beer
48 books14 followersDame Gillian Beer is a British literary critic and academic, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She was a King Edward VII Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Cambridge as wells as a past President of Clare Hall College. She also spent time as the Andrew Mellon Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 5, 2017
Кембриджська професорка Джилліан Бір - одна з тих, хто доклалися до канонічного статусу Вірджинії Вулф. Відповідно, значна частина її дослідницьких пропозицій, початково новаторських, стали частиною популярного образу Вулф, їх отримуєш просто через осмос, тож подиву вони не викликають. Крім того, я не велика фанатка Вулф і насправді не знаю її поза неминучою тріадою (Місіс Деловей-Орландо-Власна Кімната). Попри це все, ця збірка статей Джиллін Бір читається на одному подиху. Це взірець того, що й науковий текст мусить бути передовсім (а) стилістично добрим текстом; (б) добре розказаною історією, а інакше це все немає значення. Як можна не любити текст, де йдеться про те, що "мова, як риба, піднімається з глибин", чи про "мізерну літургію щоденного життя"? Чи от одразу інтригує початок розділу: "Куди поділося вікторіанське письмо? Яка доля спіткала ті закручені речення Раскіна, ті карлайлівські метафори, той ліричний дікенсівський гротеск, розрахований на живий подих, але запханий під обкладинку? А поділося воно, зокрема, у твори Вірджинії Вулф - і там із ним почали діятися дуже дивні речі".
Любов і захват у мене, коротше кажучи, до цієї британської риторичної академічної традиції (американців теж трохи зачепило - думаю про Ґрінблатта - але гніздо цього стилю, здається, таки у британців).
Любов і захват у мене, коротше кажучи, до цієї британської риторичної академічної традиції (американців теж трохи зачепило - думаю про Ґрінблатта - але гніздо цього стилю, здається, таки у британців).
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August 18, 2011This collection of essays, mostly published previously, provides interesting insights into Virginia Woolf's fascination with some scientific concepts. At the same time, one essay traces her rewriting of some unscientific Victorians, especially Ruskin, whose description of waves in Modern Painters may have influenced Woolf's thinking that led to her novel. The concluding essay on "The Aeroplane and the Island" is particularly rewarding, demonstrating the interweaving of those motifs in Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, The Years, and Between the Acts. References to Woolf's diaries, letters, and essays add to the discussions of the novels.
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