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Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere

Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere

Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere

Author:
Melba Cuddy-Keane, University of Toronto
Published:
January 2007
Availability:
Available
Format:
Paperback
ISBN:
9780521035385

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    Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere relates Woolf's literary reviews and essays to early twentieth-century debates about the value of 'highbrow' culture, the methods of instruction in universities and adult education, and the importance of an educated public for the realization of democratic goals. By focusing on Woolf's theories and practice of reading, Melba Cuddy-Keane refutes assumptions about Woolf's modernist elitism, revealing instead a writer who was pedagogically oriented, publicly engaged and committed to the ideal of classless intellectuals working together in reciprocal exchange. Woolf emerges as a stimulating theorist of the unconscious, of dialogic reading, of historicist criticism and of value judgments, while her theoretically informed but accessible prose challenges us to reflect on academic writing today. Combining a wealth of historical detail with a penetrating analysis of Woolf's essays, this 2003 study will alter our views of Woolf, of modernism and of intellectual work.

    • Provides insights into Virginia Woolf as a publicly engaged writer challenging notions of modernist intellectual's aloofness from the public sphere
    • Examines documents including radio broadcasts, periodicals and newspapers, and materials on the history of books and publishing
    • Written in a clear and accessible style

    Reviews & endorsements

    "I enthusiastically recommend the book to all readers, common and academic. ...[it] will stimulate important thinking and provide us, in our own dilemmas over education, social discourse and the future health of democracy, with a thoughtful and strategic example for negotiating these complexities." Jeanette McVicker, SUNY-Fredonia

    "In this meticulous, often brilliant book, Cuddy-Keane focuses on both the 'cultural contexts' and 'critical practice' of Woolf's more than 500 essays and reviews on literary history and criticism.... Readers of this groundbreaking book--one of the most important studies of Woolf in years--will hereafter approach Woolf's critical writings with closer attention and increased respect. Essential." Choice

    See more reviews

    Product details

    January 2007
    Paperback
    9780521035385
    248 pages
    228 × 154 × 19 mm
    0.377kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgments
    • List of abbreviations
    • Introduction: a wider sphere
    • Part I. Cultural Contexts:
    • 1. Democratic highbrow: Woolf and the classless intellectual
    • 2. Woolf, English studies and the making of the (new) common reader
    • Part II. Critical Practice:
    • 3. Woolf and the theory and pedagogy of reading
    • Postscript: intellectual work today
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index.
      Author
    • Melba Cuddy-Keane , University of Toronto

      Melba Cuddy-Keane is Associate Professor of English and a Northrop Frye Scholar at the University of Toronto. She has written widely on Virginia Woolf and literary criticism.