This book identifies water as the key element of Virginia Woolf's modernist poetics. The various forms, movements, and properties of water inspired Woolf's writing of reality, time, and bodies and offered her an apt medium to reflect on the possibilities as well as on the exhaustion of her art. As a deeply intertextual writer, Woolf recognised how profoundly water has shaped human imagination and the landscape of the literary past. In line with recent ecocritical and ecofeminist assessments of her works, this book also shows Woolf's attraction to water as part of an indifferent nature that exists prior to and beyond the symbolic. Through close analyses that span the whole of Woolf's oeuvre, and that centre on the metaphorical and the material voices of water in her works, Modernist Waterscapes offers a fresh perspective on a writing that is as versatile as the element from which it draws. The monograph addresses postgraduate students and scholars working in modernist studies andWoolf studies in particular.

Traces the metaphorical, ecological, and intertextual significance of water in Woolf's oeuvre Explores links between elemental materiality and literary form Sheds fresh light on time and memory, the body and sexuality, and silence in literary modernism

Autorentext
Marlene Dirschauer holds a PhD in Comparative Literature. Currently, she works as Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests are English modernism as well as religious writings of the early modern era.

Klappentext

This book identifies water as the key element of Virginia Woolf s modernist poetics. The various forms, movements, and properties of water inspired Woolf s writing of reality, time, and bodies and offered her an apt medium to reflect on the possibilities as well as on the exhaustion of her art. As a deeply intertextual writer, Woolf recognised how profoundly water has shaped human imagination and the landscape of the literary past. In line with recent ecocritical and ecofeminist assessments of her works, this book also shows Woolf s attraction to water as part of an indifferent nature that exists prior to and beyond the symbolic. Through close analyses that span the whole of Woolf s oeuvre, and that centre on the metaphorical and the material voices of water in her works, Modernist Waterscapes offers a fresh perspective on a writing that is as versatile as the element from which it draws. The monograph addresses postgraduate students and scholars working in modernist studies andWoolf studies in particular.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Virginia Woolf's Modernist Waterscapes.- 2. Aqueous Affinities: Woolf, Bachelard and the English Romantic Poets.- 3. 'How It Floats Me Afresh': Water in Woolf's Early Experimental Fiction.- 4. The Fluid Texture of Time: To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves.- 5. 'The Obscure Body of the Sea': Female Bodies, Water and Artistic Creation from The Voyage Out to The Waves.- 6. 'Floating Down a River into Silence': Water in Woolf's Later Works.- 7. Conclusion.