Virginia Woolf, Revaluation and Continuity

by Ralph Freedman

The renaissance of Virginia Woolf reflects a reassessment not only of Woolf as a writer but also of our social and political life as a whole. It points up differences between English and American readers, between older and younger critics, between men and women. Particularly striking in the revaluation is a tendency to approach Woolf as a soliloquist, a person, rather than as a detached and formal artist. In this collection, Ralph Freedman has brought together some of Woolf's most interesting commentators, whose varied concerns, traditional and modern, demonstrate the vitality and scope of Woolf criticism. Virginia Revaluation and Continuity contains essays by Ralph Freedman, Harvena Richter, James Hafley, Avrom Fleishman, F. P. W. McDowell, Jane Marcus, Lucio Ruotolo, Maria DiBattista, Jean O. Love, Madeline Moore, James Naremore, and B. H. Fussell. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Ralph Freedman, who grew up in Nazi Germany, emigrated at 19 to England and ultimately the United States. He served in the US Army during World War II, in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy, afterwards graduating from the University of Washington and earning a doctorate at Yale. He taught 12 years at the University of Iowa, 22 at Princeton and for two post-retirement years at Emory University. He wrote and published two novels (Divided, 1948 and Rue the Day, 2009), criticism (The Lyrical Novel, 1963), biographies of Hesse (1978), Rilke (1996), and many essays. His works have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese. A Chinese version of the biography of Rilke is in press.