Overview
- Engages with Virginia Woolf’s fiction, essays, and autobiographical writings
- Expands the trope of rooms to look at the intersection between textual, physical, and metaphorical meanings of space
- Connects interiority and space with wider geographies of gender, class, and empire
Part of the book series: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies (GSLS)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
- spatial imaginary
- tropes of rooms
- socio-cultural issues
- Virginia Woolf
- modernist literature
- transnational space
- flauneuse
- urban representations
- life writing
- autobiography
- spatiality
- A Room of One's Own
- Cheyne Walk
- Mary Geraldine Ostle
- Jacob's Room
- interiority in Virgina Woolf
- Night and Day
- Between the Acts
- class mobility
- male and female spaces in Woolf
About this book
This book provides a fascinating account of rooms in selected works by Virginia Woolf. Casting them as spaces which are at once material, textual and emotional, the volume shows Woolf’s rooms to be consistently connected to wider geographies of modernity and therefore central to her writing of gender, class, empire and the nation. The discussion moves “in and out of rooms,” from the focus on travel in Woolf’s debut novel, to the archival function of built space and literary heritage in Night and Day, the university as a male space of learning in Jacob’s Room, the iconic A Room of One’s Own and its historical readers, interior space as spatial history in The Years, and rooms as loci of memory in her unfinished memoir. Zink masterfully shows the spatial formation of rooms to be at the heart of Woolf’s interweaving of the political and the aesthetic, revealing an understanding of space as dynamic and relational.
Reviews
“Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity is successful in demonstrating the importance of rooms in Woolf’s fiction. It gives something of an overview of how these rooms function textually, while still providing detailed and rigorous analyses backed up by archival research. Zink’s work touches on a number of interesting areas, including Woolf’s readership and her use of space and place in her work more generally.” (Karina Jakubowicz, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Vol. 95, 2019)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Suzana Zink is Lecturer at the University of Neuchâtel, a position she has held since 2005. Her teaching experience includes both literature and language courses and her research interests focus on space and place in modernism, especially Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity
Authors: Suzana Zink
Series Title: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71909-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-71908-5Published: 13 February 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-89119-4Published: 06 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-71909-2Published: 01 February 2018
Series ISSN: 2578-9694
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5188
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 223
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary Theory, British and Irish Literature