Virginia Woolf and the VictoriansCriticism of Woolf is often polarised into viewing her work as either fundamentally progressive or reactionary. In this 2007 book, Steve Ellis argues that her commitment to anxiety about modernity coexists with a nostalgia and respect for aspects of Victorian culture threatened by radical social change. Ellis tracks Woolf's response to the Victorian era through her fiction and other writings, arguing that Woolf can be seen as more 'Post-Victorian' than 'modernist'. He explains how Woolf's emphasis on continuity and reconciliation related to twentieth-century debates about Victorian values, and he analyses her response to the First World War as the major threat to that continuity. This detailed and original investigation of the range of Woolf's writing attends to questions of cultural and political history and fictional structure, imagery and diction. It proposes a fresh reading of Woolf's thinking about the relationships between the past, present and future. |
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Page 21 - The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths.
Bibliographic information
| Title | Virginia Woolf and the Victorians |
| Author | Steve Ellis |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, 2007 |
| ISBN | 1139468960, 9781139468961 |
| Subjects | › › Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Literary Criticism / General Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory |
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