Average customer rating:
- Better the second time around
- Woolf in Her Prime
- An expanding web
- Septimus Warren Smith
- Flowing prose
|
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Classics
| British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Woolf, Virginia
| Classics
| British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Classics
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Literary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Woolf, Virginia
| ( W )
| Authors, A-Z
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Paperback
| Woolf, Virginia
| ( W )
| Authors, A-Z
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Psychological & Suspense
| Thrillers
| Mystery & Thrillers
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Look Inside Mystery & Thriller Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
-
The Hours
-
To the Lighthouse
-
A Room of One's Own
-
A Passage to India
-
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics)
ASIN: 0156628708 |
Amazon.com
As Clarissa Dalloway walks through London on a fine June morning, a sky-writing plane captures her attention. Crowds stare upwards to decipher the message while the plane turns and loops, leaving off one letter, picking up another. Like the airplane's swooping path, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa and those whose lives brush hers--from Peter Walsh, whom she spurned years ago, to her daughter Elizabeth, the girl's angry teacher, Doris Kilman, and war-shocked Septimus Warren Smith, who is sinking into madness.
As Mrs. Dalloway prepares for the party she is giving that evening, a series of events intrudes on her composure. Her husband is invited, without her, to lunch with Lady Bruton (who, Clarissa notes anxiously, gives the most amusing luncheons). Meanwhile, Peter Walsh appears, recently from India, to criticize and confide in her. His sudden arrival evokes memories of a distant past, the choices she made then, and her wistful friendship with Sally Seton.
Woolf then explores the relationships between women and men, and between women, as Clarissa muses, "It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together.... Her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?" While Clarissa is transported to past afternoons with Sally, and as she sits mending her green dress, Warren Smith catapults desperately into his delusions. Although his troubles form a tangent to Clarissa's web, they undeniably touch it, and the strands connecting all these characters draw tighter as evening deepens. As she immerses us in each inner life, Virginia Woolf offers exquisite, painful images of the past bleeding into the present, of desire overwhelmed by society's demands. --Joannie Kervran Stangeland
Book Description
This brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman’s life. Direct and vivid in her account of the details of Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations for a party she is to give that evening, Woolf ultimately managed to reveal much more. For it is the feeling behind these daily events that gives Mrs. Dalloway its texture and richness and makes it so memorable. Foreword by Maureen Howard.
"Mrs. Dalloway was the first novel to split the atom. If the novel before Mrs. Dalloway aspired to immensities of scope and scale, to heroic journeys across vast landscapes, with Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf insisted that it could also locate the enormous within the everyday; that a life of errands and party-giving was every bit as viable a subject as any life lived anywhere; and that should any human act in any novel seem unimportant, it has merely been inadequately observed. The novel as an art form has not been the same since.
"Mrs. Dalloway also contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century."
--Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
Download Description
A masterpiece by one of the greatest writers in English literary history, Mrs. Dalloway is both a moving and innovative novel that breaks new ground in the representation of inner experience. A day in the life of a London woman, Clarissa Dalloway, Woolf's novel is a meditation on time, perception, memory and experience. Informed by the great novelists of the previous century as well as contemporary trends in philosophy, art and literature, Mrs. Dalloway is a towering achievement by an extraordinary artist.
Customer Reviews:
Better the second time around.......2007-08-27
This was the first Woolf novel that I read and i am glad that it was. I was a college freshman who had just seen The Hours. I was immediately drawn to this author. After reading it the first time, it is possible to know what the basic story is about: a woman giving a party and wondering about the choices she has made in the past. But each reading helps bring out so many details that are easy to miss. People may claim this is a hard read, but Mrs. Woolf's books were NEVER meant to be read quickly. The word usage and details are so precise that is should be read slowly to appreciate it more. A great book to start getting into Woolf.
Woolf in Her Prime.......2007-07-15
Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) was a well known writer, critic, feminist, and publisher. This was her fourth novel.
I read her first novel "The Voyage Out" before buying the present book, then skipped her second novel - which is considered to be a flop - then read "Jacob's Room," her third, then "Mrs. Dalloway," her fourth, and then "To The Lighthouse."
"The Voyage Out" is simple and straightforward work and it might remind the reader of a Jane Austen novel, but it set on a ship and then at a remote location. It is over 400 pages long, and has an Austen theme. After her second novel - which did not do very well - Woolf decided to be more risky and creative with the next book. She changed her style and approach to the novel and Woolf uses the stream of consciousness technique to bring a sense of the chaos and shortness of a young man's life around the time of World War I, Jacob's life, i.e.: from the pandemonium of Jacob's life as portrayed by Woolf through the use of the stream of the consciousness technique, we eventually have clarity in the novel. She carries this writing style on into the similarly chaotic story in the novel "Mrs. Dalloway."
She carries this writing style on into the similarly chaotic story "Mrs. Dalloway." Mrs. Dalloway, or simply Clarrisa Dalloway the character, was used in her first novel "The Voyage Out" but only as a minor character who the protagonist, Rachel, meets on a sea voyage. Mr. Dalloway makes a pass at Rachel and kisses her. Woolf brings them back in force here with their own novel.
The present story is set in the summer in post WWI London and it revolves around a few days in the life of Mrs. Dalloway. She has a party and during that period an old suitor, Peter Walsh, makes his return appearance from an overseas job posting in India, and does so after thirty years. Part of the story involves her thoughts about that relationship and her life choices. The second plot element is mental illness and the appearance of Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife Lucrezia. He is a war survivor but is suffering from depression. The third element is her present husband and his love for her.
The compressed in time and chaotic story which involves Clarrisa, her husband, Peter Walsh, and Septimus, lends itself to the stream of consciousness technique. Some make comparisons with Joyce and his stream of consciousness novel "Ulysses." In any case, Woolf uses it to advantage here. Finally, Woolf is an author who promoted aesthetic purity in fiction. But here she uses the novel as a chance to attack the care for the mental illnesses.
This is an excellent novel written by Woolf at her prime. Her approach lends itself to the subject and it is quite effective. If you want to read a conventional novel by Woolf, then I recommend her first novel, "The Voyage Out."
An expanding web.......2007-07-04
This is a spellweaver of a book, slipping lucidly from minute to minute over the course of a perfect London summer's day, its gossamer threads forming an expanding web as complex and interconnected as a symphony. I came to it after reading TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, written two years later (1925 and 1927). Both books are set in summer, and both are confined to a single physical setting. But whereas the house and garden in TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, nominally in Scotland, might almost be anywhere, London is a real and precise presence in MRS DALLOWAY, lovingly described over a range of several miles. The later book, though concentrating on two specific days, has a span of almost a decade; MRS DALLOWAY follows the classical unity of time, starting in the early morning and continuing until night in a single unbroken span (a precedent perhaps imitated by Ian McEwan in his SATURDAY). Conversely, while TO THE LIGHTHOUSE confines itself to about a dozen characters, MRS DALLOWAY moves in ever-expanding ripples, adding more and more people as guests arrive for Clarissa Dalloway's party in the book's concluding scene.
The hours of the day are marked by the sound of Big Ben: "First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air." The image of expanding and dissipating circles is central; as in TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, Woolf is preoccupied with the passage of time; both books are a memento mori. But neither one is grim; there is a summer freshness here, a feeling for the charm of society life in a great city, that fits the preliminary musical chimes of the great clock -- but the irrevocable toll of time is not forgotten. We see Clarissa Dalloway, a little over fifty, wife of a respected politician with an assured place in society. Like the sound of the clock, like ripples on the water, her circles have also expanded since her marriage, but have they also dissipated, dissolved in the air? Near the beginning of the book, she is visited by Peter Walsh, a former suitor whom she refused some thirty years before, now back home after many years in India. Both of them have changed, but the memories take her back and force her to weigh and reweigh her concepts of success and happiness.
All the characters in the novel are known personally to Clarissa Dalloway, with the exception of only two: Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife Lucrezia, whose story, weaving in and out of the main one, takes up about a fifth of the whole. Septimus, a clerk by profession but something of a poet and aesthete, has returned from the war unable to feel. When his best friend is killed in the last days of the war, he congratulates himself on surviving without cracking up, but soon begins to recognize his lack of emotion for the curse that it is; he married Lucrezia largely in an attempt to overcome this. He must be one of the first victims of shell-shock to appear in literature (but not the last: see Pat Barker's magnificent REGENERATION and all of Jacqueline Winspear's MAISIE DOBBS series). Virtually everything in Woolf's mature novels is connected primarily by thought rather than through action, but this takes the principle even farther, linking Septimus to Clarissa in theme only, as her Doppelgänger; the author admitted as much in a later preface. In some ways they are opposites: Clarissa so full of life, a society hostess married to an establishment figure; and Septimus, potentially suicidal (like Woolf herself), a provincial nobody married to the daughter of a foreign innkeeper. And yet, for all his inability to feel, there is an immediacy to the scenes between Septimus and Lucrezia, whose lives are played out in emotional primary colors, whereas Clarissa's world, for all its brilliance, is in iridescent shimmers and half-tones.
And what of Mr. Richard Dalloway, MP? We see surprisingly little of him, but what we do see only emphasizes the theme of lost feeling that runs through the book. Something makes him realize that it has been years since he has told his wife of his love. So he buys a great bunch of flowers and we see him "walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her." The phrase is repeated again and again. When he does get home, the scene does not go quite like that, but it is a touching one all the same. For Richard is one of those Englishmen who can only show their feelings obliquely. Poor Peter Walsh, on the other hand, who weeps openly and is an emotional wreck, is considered a failure, "not quite the thing." And Clarissa, still precariously aware of both sides of her nature, must steer her way between the two. And we rejoice that she can.
Septimus Warren Smith.......2007-06-27
In this novel, we see into the consciousness of the characters, in particular, Clarrissa Dalloway and the war-beaten Septimus Warren Smith. Woolf writes with empathy which is based on her own inner torment. This causes him to commit suicide due to his aversion to being placed in an institution by Dr. Holmes Bradshaw. Unrequited love for Isabel Pole, resonant in the beginning, shown as his poetry is corrected by her in red ink. This must seem slightly amusing to the author, but I find it sad.
I think I am him.
Flowing prose.......2007-06-27
coherrant, long, rythmic sentences on daily life of upper middle class of 18th century london.I found the book interesting and a delight to read.
Average customer rating:
- A League of Her Own
- Notice
|
Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated)
Virginia Woolf
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Woolf, Virginia
| Classics
| British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Literary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Woolf, Virginia
| ( W )
| Authors, A-Z
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Paperback
| Woolf, Virginia
| ( W )
| Authors, A-Z
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Fiction Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
-
A Room of One's Own (Annotated)
-
Dubliners (Norton Critical Edition)
-
The Waves
-
Orlando (Annotated): A Biography
-
The Hours
ASIN: 0156030357 |
Book Description
Harcourt is proud to introduce new annotated editions of three Virginia Woolf classics, ideal for the college classroom and beyond. For the first time, students reading these books will have the resources at hand to help them understand the text as well as the reasons and methods behind Woolf's writing. We've commissioned the best-known Woolf scholars in the field to provide invaluable introductions, editing, critical analysis, and suggestions for further reading. These much-awaited volumes are the first of many annotated Woolf editions Harcourt plans on publishing in the coming years.
This brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life. Direct and vivid in her account of the details of Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for a party she is to give that evening,Woolf ultimately managed to reveal much more; for it is the feeling behind these daily events that gives Mrs. Dalloway its texture and richness and makes it so memorable.
Annotated and with an introduction by Bonnie Scott
Customer Reviews:
A League of Her Own.......2007-05-15
This is a fine edition and value, including a helpful preface introducing the author and novel as well as an appendix (the "annotated" part) with explanations of terms, places, and designations for non-Londoners along with identifications of literary, political and historical allusions for readers who could use a little extra help.
Anyone who has read James Joyce's "The Dead" will recognize some of the same themes and preoccupations in "Mrs. Dalloway," which in addition evokes numerous English "comedies of manners" as well as satirical narratives about a straight-laced Victorian culture that has become an anachronism in the 1920s. The story at times resembles a Jane Austen novel, except for the absence of a "fixed" point-of-view or reliable standard by which to measure the characters, each of which has, to lesser or greater degrees, sympathetic and unsympathetic qualities and is shown from the "inside" as a mind-in-process, a consciousness-in-flux (consequently, a reader needs to be careful not to apply an overly "logical" approach, insistent upon hanging on to a single point or statement as "the truth" about a character, who is more likely to try one possibility, then another, leaving it up to the reader to infer a character's essence through careful consideration of the important meanings derived from multiple impressions).
This is not a novel for the impatient or tone-deaf. Woolf creates a character's interior life through a virtuosic, highly mobile third-person narrator, who might be thought of as the character's "persona," not merely "expressing" the character's thoughts but "mirroring" how the character perceives him or herself as seen by others. Moreover, the indefinite pronouns can shift unexpectedly or occur in too close proximity to make identification easy or even definite. As a result, the reader has to work overtime to achieve entrance into the mind of the "right" character while simultaneously sensing the liquid, interpenetrating and shared qualities of human identity itself. And finally there's that tone, now soft, next loud, and never to be trusted to be without irony.
Woolf makes it fairly easy on the reader with the broad, sardonic strokes she uses to paint the practically villainous Sir William Bradshaw, the eminent psychiatrist viewed by many (especially himself) as the scientific high priest of this cross-section of deluded London luminaries; and she's equally nasty to her other "villain," Miss Kilman, a repressed and embittered born-again Christian who, like Sir William, lives by the code of "conversion," Woolf's euphemism for those powerful personalities who are bent upon breaking, controlling and dominating the will of anyone not strong enough to resist them. The other portraits are more subtle, requiring the reader either to hear the soft, nuanced ironical tones or risk missing both the social satire and the character. Woolf's targets range, perhaps not surprisingly, from the pretense, pride, and hypocrisy of an out-of-touch social stratum that clings to the "orderly" past; to the arrogance of modern medical "science"; to, more surprisingly, the suffocating alternatives offered by both religion and love.
Readers lured to this novel because of Cunningham's "The Hours" (novel or film) may be disappointed or quickly frustrated. Moving from Cunningham to Woolf is a bit like going from Fitzgerald to Faulkner, or from Austen to Shakespeare. What you immediately notice is, despite Woolf's limiting her story to a single day (compared to Cunningham's three-generation setting), the far greater range and more inclusive thematic focus and, most importantly, the sheer power and vitality of the prose (from fluid motion to dynamic rush). Woolf--like Joyce, Faulkner, and Shakespeare--employs a syntax that can cause the earth to move from under a reader's feet: she's a writer who represents not merely individual characters but captures the world whole not to mention the life of language itself.
The greatest challenge "Mrs. Dalloway" presents to a first-time reader is never to let up. It's essential to stay with Clarissa throughout her entire day, finally becoming a fully engaged participant in the party itself--the final thirty pages of the novel, which contain some of Woolf's best writing. Especially critical is the extended moment, almost 20 pages into the party scene, when Clarissa, like Septimus, walks to the window and has her epiphany. At that moment, one character chooses death; the other, life. But Woolf enables us to see these apparently opposite choices as "existential" cognates: both characters make choices that enable them to save their souls.
Cunningham is a first-rate stylist and craftsman who can tell a story that's moving and evocative, a narrative, moreover, that connects with today's readers by affirming the choices available to the self. But it inevitably pales alongside the vibrant novel and microcosm of life that is its source and inspiration. Virginia, like her character Clarissa, knows how to throw a party.
Notice.......2007-01-04
It's a very good book. Mrs. Dalloway is very important book to understand the psycological game of a woman with existential problems in the twenties.
Book Description
'Fear no more the heat of the sun.' Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.
Customer Reviews:
tedious.......2007-01-12
I really liked the movie "the Hours", loosely based on this book, so I thought I'd read it... I couldn't get through it. I love many classic books, but I'll not try another by Virginia Woolf.
Book Description
This first volume of its kind contains the complete text of and guide to Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, plus Mrs. Dalloway's Party and numerous journal entries and letters by Virginia Woolf relating to the book's genesis and writing. The distinguished novelist Francine Prose has selected these pieces as well as essays and appreciations, critical views, and commentary by writers famous and unknown. Now with additional scholarly commentary by Mark Hussey, professor of English at Pace University, this complete volume illuminates the creation of a celebrated story and the genius of its author.
Includes essays and commentary from:
Michael Cunningham
E. M. Forster
Margo Jefferson
James Wood
Mary Gordon
Elaine Showalter
Daniel Mendelsohn
Sigrid Nunez
Deborah Eisenberg
Elissa Schappell
Customer Reviews:
A Book Written Specifically for Woolfies.......2007-04-18
I admit that I almost was very middle aged when I read any of Woolf's novels. And, that was only because I read "The Hours."
I learned that the character names therein related to Mrs. Dalloway and other characters of her novels. So, I picked up "To the Lighthouse" and experienced my first "stream of consciousness" style which I analogize to ADD - now the novel is dialogue, then thought, then observation, then . . . and all in one sentence. But, within that one sentence, you learn more than most authors can present on pages.
Reading one page of Woolf takes twice or three times as much time as other authors. Basically, the density of the writing style prohibits skimming, prohibits glossing, or prohibits you from losing concentration.
Modern authors who can conjure as much in as little paper include J.M. Coetzee or V.S. Naipual. These are three great names in the all-time history of fiction. I truly believe that she influenced these writers and hundreds of others.
This book awakened me to many things which I did not know lay within the pages. And, it also helped explain some of the orthodox-like exactitude of the characters, names and plot of "The Hours." Woolf's fans are true blue, died-in-the-wool absolutists. And, this book reflects that more than anything. Many of the published fans herein are famous in their own right, and they are just as devout to Woolf as her secret admirers - like me and probably you (who else but a Woolfie would be reading about this book?).
I recommend this book greatly as it educated me more than I could ever have imagined about the relationship between the book and her life and other related events.
A Brilliant Writer Negotiates the Works of a Brilliant Writer.......2006-12-11
Francine Prose is one of our more important writers (novels 'Blue Angel', 'After', 'A Changed Man', 'Primitive People'; probing biographies 'Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles'), a writer with a profound respect of the past, for the art of writing and the art of reading. Her most recent book is titled 'Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them' should give an idea of what is in store in this most enjoyable and illuminating book THE MRS. DALLOWAY READER.
Prose writes an Introduction that, while brief, offers keys to unlocking the genius that was Virginia Woolf. 'She longed to fill the book [Mrs. Dalloway] with "speed and life", to "give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticize the social system & to show it at work, at its most intense.' Prose extracts quotes form Woolf's writings in an astute manner that allows us to understand the tortured genius who wrote them. As far as the book 'Mrs. Dalloway', Prose writes '...its all here: life, death, sex, love, marriage, parenthood, youth, age, the present and the past, memory, London, war, reason and unreason, loyalty, medicine, social snobbery, friendship, compassion, cruelty; the occasionally apt but more often unfounded snap judgments we make about ourselves, each other, loved ones, strangers, and the world in which chance and fortune have thrown us all together'. She touches on Woolf's insanity and conflicted sexuality that blossomed with Vita Sackville-West, and with her suicide by drowning, but she is far more interested in sharing the manner in which Woolf created her books - her fleshing out of the state of consciousness.
As editor Francine Prose then gathers writings form such erudite dignitaries as Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, Michael Cunningham, Daniel Mendelsohn, Sigrud Nunez et al, couples these observations with Woolf's own serialized beginnings of her famous novel, and then offers us the entire MRS DALLOWAY at the end of the book. Reading Virginia Woolf in this atmosphere serves to enlighten the reader and once again prove that this novel is one of the more important writings of the last century. This book is a treasure! Grady Harp, December 06
There she was.......2006-02-09
`Mrs Dalloway' is a kind of cultural phenomena.
Everyone that I know has a different take on who she is, what this book is, and what the novel is supposed to stand for. Enter into this fray the authors own opinion about the whole of it and you have an all-out melee of fiction versus fiction.
This book, The Mrs Dalloway Reader, attempts to focus this problem somewhat. In it, not only will you find the novel itself, but you will also find various supplementary materials that help to ease you into what this novel is and what it means to so many different people. From those whose experience began with trying to impress a girl (and the lucky happenstance of finding the book at a Book-Mobile) to those who fought off the strains of absinthe addiction, the short pieces in range from essays to the first `draft' of the novel `Mrs Dalloway's Party'. Include in this assortment such lovingly-crafted emulations as Jane Mansfield's `The Garden Party' and you've got yourself a real winning combination.
But is this a good reason to buy this book? Don't you need more reasons? Of course!
Take this one: I knew absolutely nothing about Virginia Woolf when I purchased this book. She lived about 100 years ago. She wrote many books and I've seen some of her diaries in the hands of female students when I was in high school about ten years ago. She is popular with the intelligent-female group, those who want to be well-read and know the difference between Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Add to this that I am a guy. Now, take all that and combine it, dashing in the fact that this book single-handedly introduced me to who Virginia Woolf is and what she stood for- just through the supplementary material- and you have not only a great novel but a good place to get your foot into the door of this wonderful writer.
Is that still not enough? Okay: supplementary material aside, how is the book? Wonderful. It is a style of writing that I've heard called `Impressionistic' by some learned person. This is true- until you read Virginia Woolf (who is far easier to understand than other stream-of-consciousness writers such as Joyce) you have no idea what great pictures such simple things as words can express. Mrs Dalloway does this too, moving the reader through a simple narrative that is painted with poetical words, bringing to life a novel that is to fiction what Renoir is to painting; only the basic outline is there, amid all the broad strokes, and you must look to find it...but it is amazing when you see it.
LP
Bottom line: If you know nothing about Virginia Woolf and want a good, solid platform from which to start, pick this one. If you know a lot about her and want to explore more, you pick this one too.
Woolf is not easy, but this book makes her easier.......2004-01-03
Francine Prose's Mrs. Dalloway Reader makes the enigmatic and brilliant Virginia Woolf's masterpiece and bit easier for us modern readers. Since the publication of Cunningham's spectacular The Hours and the movie titled the same, Woolf's writing has undergone a renaissance, rising once again on bestseller lists everywhere. But she's STILL difficult, with the loooong sentences, endless paragraphs, the convoluted windings of words and thoughts and phrases and explanations and descriptions and disclaimers with which her writing is rife.
This book is the missing link. It includes the complete text of Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Dalloway's Party, plus relevant journal entries and letters by Virginia Woolf relating to the creation of Mrs. Dalloway. Also included are essays and reviews by other writers, all about Mrs. Dalloway. Taken all together, these snippets function like a lovely roadmap into not only the character of Mrs. Dalloway, but into the mind of her creator.
Top notch.
Average customer rating:
|
Out of Touch: Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)
Curtin
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Classics
| United States
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Reference
| Books & Reading
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
| Classics
| Comic
| Contemporary
| Literary
General
| Criticism & Theory
| History & Criticism
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Writing
| Reference
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0415940192 |
Book Description
Out of Touch investigates how skin has become a crucial but disavowed figure in twentieth-century literature, theory, and cultural criticism. These discourses reveal the extent to which skin figures in the cultural effect of changes in visual technologies, a development argued by critics to be at the heart of the contest between surface and depth and, by extension, Western globalization and identity politics. The skin has a complex history as a metaphorical terrain over which ideological wars are fought, identity is asserted through modification as in tattooing, and meaning is inscribed upon the human being. Yet even as interventions on the skin characterize much of this history, fantasy and science fiction literature and film trumpet skin's passing in the cybernetic age, and feminist theory calls for abandoning the skin as a hostile boundary.
Customer Reviews:
myriad of impressions.......2005-02-25
Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf's novel about the ecstasy of living against a barrage of limitations brought about by the aging process, the roles we play in the world, and the contradictions of the modern age in all its fragments, where a loss of identity leaves the self disillusioned. It is about the repressed consciousness, and the need to hold oneself up; the sheer terror of living on the precipice of madness; and how one finds the self in the other.
Average customer rating:
|
Mrs Dalloway (Penguin Popular Classics)
Virginia Woolf
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Woolf, Virginia
| Classics
| British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Classics
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Woolf, Virginia
| ( W )
| Authors, A-Z
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Paperback
| Woolf, Virginia
| ( W )
| Authors, A-Z
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
( W )
| Authors, A-Z
| Literature & Fiction
| 4-for-3 Books Store
| Stores
| Books
| Wharton, Edith
| Whitman, Walt
| Wilde, Oscar
| Williams, Tennessee
| Wilson, Lanford
| Wodehouse, P.G.
Classics
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| 4-for-3 Books Store
| Stores
| Books
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| 4-for-3 Books Store
| Stores
| Books
Classics
| British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| 4-for-3 Books Store
| Stores
| Books
| Austen, Jane
| Bronte, Charlotte
| Bronte, Emily
| Bunyan, John
| Carroll, Lewis
| Chaucer, Geoffrey
| Collins, Wilkie
| Conrad, Joseph
| Dickens, Charles
| Eliot, George
| General
| Hardy, Thomas
| James, Henry
| Kipling, Rudyard
| Lawrence, D.H.
| Wilde, Oscar
All 4-for-3 Deals
| 4-for-3 Books Store
| Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
-
The Hours
-
To the Lighthouse
-
The Hours: A Novel
-
Heart of Darkness (Dover Thrift Editions)
-
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Signet Classics)
ASIN: 0140622217 |
Average customer rating:
|
Great Classic Library: Virginia Woolf (Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse)
Virginia Woolf
Manufacturer: Chancellor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Woolf, Virginia
| Classics
| British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Woolf, Virginia
| ( W )
| Authors, A-Z
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Paperback
| Woolf, Virginia
| ( W )
| Authors, A-Z
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1851524908 |
Average customer rating:
|
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Manufacturer: Recorded Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette
Woolf, Virginia
| Classics
| British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Woolf, Virginia
| ( W )
| Authors, A-Z
| Books on Cassette
| Audiobooks
| Formats
| Books
ASIN: 1402522428 |
Books:
- My Antonia
- Native Son (Perennial Classics)
- Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (American Empire Project)
- Notes from Underground
- Oliver Twist (Penguin Classics)
- One Hundred Years of Solitude (Oprah's Book Club)
- One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
- Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass
- Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics)
- Planet India: How the Fastest Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Landscapes and Cityscapes
- Horsekeeping on a Small Acreage: Designing and Managing Your Equine Facilities
- Dog Tags Yapping: The World War II Letters of a Combat GI
- Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World
- History: Fiction or Science
- King Lear
- History: Fiction or Science
- Resumes, Cover-Letters and Interviewing: Setting the Stage for Success
- Emergent Commercial Trends and Aviation Safety
- Enough Already! Breaking Free in the Second Half of Life