Imagining Virginia Woolf : an experiment in critical biography / Maria DiBattista.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

DiBattista, Maria, 1947-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Authors, English--20th century--Biography.

Authors, English.

Authorship--Psychological aspects.

Authorship.

Personality in literature.

Authors and readers.

Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941.

Woolf, Virginia.

Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941--Psychology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (204 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Where other works of literary criticism are absorbed with the question--How to read a book?--Imagining Virginia Woolf asks a slightly different but more intriguing one: how does one read an author? Maria DiBattista answers this by undertaking an experiment in critical biography. The subject of this work is not Virginia Woolf, the person who wrote the novels, criticism, letters, and famous diary, but a different being altogether, someone or something Maria DiBattista identifies as "the figment of the author." This is the Virginia Woolf who lives intermittently in the pages of her writings and in the imagination of her readers. Drawing on Woolf's own extensive remarks on the pleasures and perils of reading, DiBattista argues that reading Woolf, in fact reading any author, involves an encounter with this imaginative figment, whose distinct, stylistic traits combine to produce that beguiling phantom--the literary personality. DiBattista reveals a writer who possessed not a single personality, but a cluster of distinct, yet complementary identities: the Sibyl of Bloomsbury, the Author, the Critic, the World Writer, and the Adventurer, the last of which, DiBattista claims, unites them all. Imagining Virginia Woolf provides an original way of reading, one that captures with variety and subtlety the personality that exists only in Woolf's works and in the minds of her readers.

Contents:

The demon of reading

The figment of the author

Personalities

Woolf's personalities

The Sibyl of the drawing room

The author

The critic

The world writer

The adventurer

Epilogue

Anon once more.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [173]-189) and index.

ISBN:

9786612157288

9781282157286

1282157280

9781400830046

1400830044

OCLC:

438200698