Virginia Woolf, Literary Materiality, and Feminist Aesthetics : From Pen to Print

This book interrogates the relationship between the material conditions of Woolf's writing practices and her work as a printer and publisher at the Hogarth Press. In bringing to light her embodied literary processes, from drafting and composition to hand-printing and binding, this study foregrounds the interactions between Woolf's modernist experimentation and the visual and material aspects of her printed works. By drawing on the field of print culture, as well as the materialist turn in Woolf scholarship, it explores how her experience in print, book-design and publishing underlines her experimental writing, and how her literary texts are conditioned by the context of their production. This book, therefore, provides new ways of reading Woolf's modernism in the context of twentieth-century print, material, and visual cultures. By suggesting that Woolf's work at the Hogarth Press sensitized her to the significant role the visual aspects of a text play in its system of representation, it also considers the extent to which materiality informs both her work, as well as her engagement with Bloomsbury formalist aesthetics, which often exaggerate the distinction between visual and verbal modes of expression. Acknowledgements About This Book Contents About the Author Abbreviations List of Figures Part I: Materiality Chapter 1: Introduction: Writing, Materiality, and Aesthetics Virginia Stephen’s Books: Covers, Bindings, and Papers The Hogarth Press and The Omega Workshops Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury Visual Aesthetics Works Cited Chapter 2: Conversations in Colour and Ink: Feminist Aesthetics in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and Kew Gardens First Marks: Virginia Woolf and Dora Carrington Vanessa Bell, The Hogarth Press, and Original Woodcuts by Various Artists Staining the Page with Colour: Kew Gardens Works Cited Chapter 3: ‘Fill in the sketch as you like’: Developing the Fragmentary Form of Jacob’s Room Printing, Writing, and Domesticity: Literary and Visual Contexts Blank Space and Self-Doubt ‘The notes accumulate’: Fragments and Feminism in Jacob’s Room Works Cited Chapter 4: ‘The cold raw edge of one’s relinquished pages’: Reading Mrs Dalloway as a Palimpsest Silk, Gloves, Flowers: ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ to Mrs Dalloway ‘Communication is health. Communication is happiness’: ‘The Prime Minister’, ‘Montaigne’, and Mrs Dalloway The Palimpsest of Mind: Virginia Woolf and Thomas De Quincey Works Cited Part II: Aesthetics Chapter 5: Drafting Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe: Feminist Aesthetics in the Manuscript of To the Lighthouse Bloomsbury Aesthetics: Vanessa Bell’s Studland Beach Early Sketches of Miss Sophie Briscoe Mrs Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, and Vanessa Bell Lily Briscoe and Virginia Woolf’s Theory of Form Works Cited Chapter 6: ‘A succession of semblances’: Form and Feminism in The Waves ‘Every moment has a thousand shapes’: Virginia Woolf’s Theory of Form in The Waves ‘Character is colour’: Susan and Vanessa Bell ‘Sullen storm-tinted and all one purple’: Susan’s Feminist and Anti-Imperialist Aesthetics Works Cited Chapter 7: ‘Getting the past to shadow this broken surface’: Time, Materiality, and Aesthetics The Words Might Have Been Written by Anon Making It Whole: ‘Sketch of the Past’ Works Cited Index