This book provides utstanding, in-depth scholarship by renowned literary critics; great starting point for students seeking an introduction to the theme and the critical discussions surrounding it. Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf & 20th Century Women Writers introduces readers to the major turning points that occurred during this revolutionary time period. The essays in this volume showcase the multivalent nature of Woolf's life and fiction, along with her pervasive and varied influence on a diverse array of women writers from Britain, Ireland, America, New Zealand, and the Caribbean. The women writers that were chosen represent Woolf's transatlantic appeal across ethnic and national lines, across affinity and influence, friendship and mentorship. The first essay explores the double vision of reflection and refraction that blurs the boundary between the interior and exterior in Woolf's extended essay A Room of One's Own (1929), an inspirational and controversial centerpiece of feminism. The next four critical context essays lay an introductory foundation that imparts a broad vision of Woolf's historical context and critical reception, and then a more concentrated comparison and close textual analysis of Woolf's works. Turning the focus towards women writers who interacted with Woolf or her writings via affinity, influence, or friendship, the next eleven essays in the volume convey comparative, critical readings of a wide variety of texts that reveal intertextual convergences with Woolf's feminist perspectives. Works discussed in Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf and 20th Century Women Writers include the most important and most frequently discussed women's writings that ultimately lead to the success of the women's suffrage movement, including "The most amazing senses of her generation": Colourist Design in Katherine Mansfield's Fiction by Angela Smith, Rebecca West: Twentieth-Century Heretical Humanist by Bernard Schweizer, Killing the Angel and the Monster: A Comparative and Postcolonial Analysis of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and Virginia Woolf's "The Voyage Out" by Mich Yonah Nyawalo, "It Had Grown in a Machine": Transience of Identity and the Search for a Room of One's Own in "Quicksand and Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral" by Christopher Allen Varlack, Parties, Pins, and Perspective: Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, and Matrilineal Inheritance by Emily Daniell Magruder, An Irish Woman Poet's Room: Eavan Boland's Debt to Virginia Woolf by Helen Emmitt, Spaciousness and Subjectivity in Alice Walker's Womanist Prose: From Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" to a Garden with "Every Color Flower Represented" by Sarah L. Skripsky, Raced Bodies, Corporeal Texts: Narratives of Home and Self in Sandra Cisneros' "The House on Mango Street" by Shanna M. Salinas, Destabilizing Life Writings: Narrative and Temporal Ruptures in "The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Orlando" by Quynh Nhu Le, and Narrative Forms and Feminist (Dis)Contents: An Intertextual Reading of the Prose of Tony Morrison and Virginia Woolf by Sandra Cox. Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf and 20th Century Women Writers offers such a diverse mosaic of women writers, who resist the external imposition of patriarchal definitions of identity, demonstrates the multifaceted appeal of Woolf's feminist legacy, as delineated in A Room of One's Own, where she beckons women writers to privacy and independence, courage and creativity as they begin to fill the blank page. Her legacy lives on today in the essays included in this volume, which not only provide innovative scholarship, but also an extensive range of critical perspectives on twentieth-century women writers, writers who have sought the new sentence and sequence that Woolf summons, writers who have developed a powerful poetry and prose of their own. This influential title, Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf and 20th Century Women Writers, will benefit a wide range of academic and literary research needs. Its critical readings and in depth critical contexts will be useful for all students, researchers, or anyone interested in learning more about Woolf's influence on women's writings in the 20th century. - Publisher.

Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries helps us comprehend the ways that women writers and artists contributed to and complicated modernism by contextualizing them alongside Woolf's work.

An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies--of strength, style, and creativity--shaped Woolf's path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf's French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Th r se de L'Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf's aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sisters Stella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.

Virginia Woolf's playful exploration of a satirical »Oxbridge« became one of the world's most groundbreaking writings on women, writing, fiction, and gender. A Room of One's Own [1929] can be read as one or as six different essays, narrated from an intimate first-person perspective. Actual history blends with narrative and memoir. But perhaps most revolutionary was its address: the book is written by a woman for women. Male readers are compelled to read through women's eyes in a total inversion of the traditional male gaze. VIRGINIA WOOLF [1882–1941] was an English author. With novels like Jacob’s Room [1922], Mrs Dalloway [1925], To the Lighthouse [1927], and Orlando [1928], she became a leading figure of modernism and is considered one of the most important English-language authors of the 20th century. As a thinker, with essays like A Room of One’s Own [1929], Woolf has influenced the women’s movement in many countries.

In Woolf's writings Greece and Greek tragedy in particular shape an exoticized aesthetic space that both emerges from and enables critique of the cosy settings and colonialist conceits of elite (and largely male) British attitudes toward culture and politics. Rather than highlighting Woolf's exclusion from male intellectual purviews, as so many scholars have emphasized, this book urges attention on how her engagements with Greek tragedy both collude with and challenge modernist aesthetics and contemporary politics. Woolf's encounters with and uses of Greek tragedy fantasize an alternative perceptual capacity that correlates to feminine (and feminist) modes, which are depicted in her writings as alternately defiant and choral. In this scheme, Greek tragedy is something of a dreamland, the mysterious dynamics of which Woolf treats as transcending cultural attitudes that hinge upon imperialist adventuring and violence. As scholars have recognized, especially in recent decades, the exoticizing gestures central to the work of so many modernists have uncomfortable political underpinnings, since they frequently inhabit imperialist and colonialist perspectives while appearing to critique them. Unlike most scholars, Nancy Worman argues that Woolf is no exception, although the feminism and humour that inflects so many "Greek" elements in her work saves it from the worst offenses.

Here, in more than forty essays, are Woolf's thoughts on her contemporaries in the art of fiction; reviewing and criticism; and one of her favorite themes, female novelists. Among the writers reviewed are Dorothy Richardson, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and Theodore Dreiser. Preface by Jean Guiguet.