Modernist Waterscapes : Water, Imagination and Materiality in the Works of Virginia Woolf

This book identifies water as the key element of Virginia Woolfs modernist poetics. The various forms, movements, and properties of water inspired Woolfs 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 Woolfs 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 Woolfs 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 and Woolf studies in particular. 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 "This deeply thoughtful phenomenological study makes a welcome move from psychology to poetics in its original and illuminating account of Woolf's imaginative engagement with 'waterscapes'. Ranging over all the forms of Woolf's writing, Dirschauer contributes significantly to recent ecocritical readings of Woolf, beautifully mapping a network which encompasses English Romantic poets and Woolf's contemporaries." -- Mark Hussey, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Pace University, USA "In Modernist Waterscapes Marlene Dirschauer has captured the complexity, fullness, wonder, and fluid power of Woolf's writing....This is a profound and delightfully illuminating study of Woolf's immersion in the literary past as she creates radically new aesthetic forms that shape human connections with the vast web of the biosphere and its natural forces. A necessary new book for anyone interested in Virginia Woolf." -- Louise Westling, Professor Emerita of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, USA 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 students and scholars working in modernist studies and Woolf studies in particular. 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 Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements Contents Abbreviations Chapter 1: Introduction: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Waterscapes 1.1 Modernism and Water: ‘Blueing’ Virginia Woolf 1.2 The Materiality of Metaphor 1.3 Mapping Modernist Waterscapes References Chapter 2: Aqueous Affinities: Woolf, Bachelard and the English Romantic Poets 2.1 Bachelard’s Water and Dreams and Woolf’s Poetics of Water 2.2 Woolf’s Waterscapes: ‘More Congenial to Me Than Any Human Being’ 2.3 ‘And Myself So Eliminated of Human Features’: Water and the Appeal of the Impersonal 2.4 From the ‘Incessant Shower’ to the ‘Bottom of the Sea’: Woolf’s Dialectics of Surface and Depth 2.5 Writing in Water: Woolf, Keats and the Possibilities of Ambiguity References Chapter 3: ‘How It Floats Me Afresh’: Water in Woolf’s Early Experimental Fiction 3.1 ‘And We, Submerged, Widen Our Eyes Again’: Exploring New Territories in the Early Stories 3.2 The Blue Air-Ball Beneath the Fountain: Elusive (Subject) Matter in Jacob’s Room References Chapter 4: The Fluid Texture of Time: To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves 4.1 The Rhythm Between Depth and Surface: Competing Temporalities in Mrs. Dalloway 4.2 ‘In the Face of the Flowing’: Movement and Ecstasis in To the Lighthouse 4.3 The Aggregate States of Time: (Re)Writing Literary History in Orlando 4.4 ‘And Time Lets Fall Its Drop’: Saturating the Moment in The Waves References Chapter 5: ‘The Obscure Body of the Sea’: Female Bodies, Water and Artistic Creation from The Voyage Out to The Waves 5.1 The Voyage Out: The Young Woman and the Sea 5.2 ‘To Move and Float and Sink’: Artistic Immersion in To the Lighthouse 5.3 Attached to the Sea: Fluid Bodies in The Waves References Chapter 6: ‘Floating Down a River into Silence’: Water in Woolf’s Later Works 6.1 ‘And Then We Sank into Silences’: The Metapoetics of The Waves 6.2 The Silence of the Fish: Opaque Water and the Constraints of Language in Between the Acts 6.3 ‘The Watering Place’: The Deterioration of Words into Wastewater References Chapter 7: Conclusion References Index