Dalgarno examines Woolf's engagement with notions of the visible.

"The finest critical book on Virgina Woolf to date. Alex Zwerdling's large and subtle study places Virginia Woolf's world of class, politics, feminism, pacifism, and the family into firm historical perspective. The book leaves us with renewed appreciation for Woolf's work and for her mind." -Elaine Showalter, Princeton University "Buried beneath piles of criticism Virginia Woolf has at last been dug out by Alex Zwerdling. Virginia Woolf and the Real World is the most enlightened account of the real woman to appear for years." -Noel Annan, The Observer "A relief from the Bloomsbury fan dub: penetrating, learned, wide-ranging appreciation of Virginia Woolf in her social and political context, documenting what muscle and thought there was in her allegedly gossamer work." -Richard Mayne, Encounter "A well written book that deals with a field of Woolf studies that badly needs dear thinking and dear expression .... I think it a most useful work and in every way first rate." -Quentin Bell

In her timely contribution to revisionist approaches in modernist studies, Lorraine Sim offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's conception of ordinary experience as revealed in her fiction and nonfiction. Contending that Woolf's representations of everyday life both acknowledge and provide a challenge to characterizations of daily life as mundane, Sim shows how Woolf explores the potential of everyday experience as a site of personal meaning, social understanding, and ethical value. Sim's argument develops through readings of Woolf's literary representations of a subject's engagement with ordinary things like a mark on the wall, a table, or colour; Woolf's accounts of experiences that are both common and extraordinary such as physical pain or epiphanic 'moments of being'; and Woolf's analysis of the effect of new technologies, for example, motor-cars and the cinema, on contemporary understandings of the external world. Throughout, Sim places Woolf's views in the context of the philosophical and lay accounts of ordinary experience that dominated the cultural thought of her time. These include British Empiricism, Romanticism, Platonic thought and Post-Impressionism. In addition to drawing on the major novels, particularly The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, Sim focuses close attention on short stories such as 'The Mark on the Wall', 'Solid Objects', and 'Blue & Green'; nonfiction works, including 'On Being Ill', 'Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-car', and 'A Sketch of the Past'; and Woolf's diaries. Sim concludes with an account of Woolf's ontology of the ordinary, which illuminates the role of the everyday in Woolf's ethics.

The category of vision is significant for Modernist texts as well as for the unfolding discourse of Modernism itself. Within the general Modernist fascination with the artistic and experimental possibilities of vision and perception this study looks at Virginia Woolf’s novels and her critical writings and examines the relation between visuality and aesthetics. An aesthetics of vision, as this study argues, becomes a productive principle of narrative. The visual is not only pertinent to Woolf’s processes of composition, but her works create a kind of vision that is proper to the text itself – a vision that reflects on the experience of seeing and renegotiates the relation between the reader and the text. The study investigates key dimensions of aesthetic vision. It addresses vision in the context of theories of aesthetic experience and identifies a semantics of seeing. It analyses functions of symbolic materiality in the presentation of boundaries of perception, modes of temporality and poetic potentialities. In exploring the connections between vision and language, it seeks to provide new perspectives for a reassessment of what occurs in Modernism's relation to vision.

In her timely contribution to revisionist approaches in modernist studies, Lorraine Sim offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's conception of ordinary experience as revealed in her fiction and nonfiction. Contending that Woolf's representations of everyday life both acknowledge and provide a challenge to characterizations of daily life as mundane, Sim shows how Woolf explores the potential of everyday experience as a site of personal meaning, social understanding, and ethical value. Sim's argument develops through readings of Woolf's literary representations of a subject's engagement with ordinary things like a mark on the wall, a table, or colour; Woolf's accounts of experiences that are both common and extraordinary such as physical pain or epiphanic 'moments of being'; and Woolf's analysis of the effect of new technologies, for example, motor-cars and the cinema, on contemporary understandings of the external world. Throughout, Sim places Woolf's views in the context of the philosophical and lay accounts of ordinary experience that dominated the cultural thought of her time. These include British Empiricism, Romanticism, Platonic thought and Post-Impressionism. In addition to drawing on the major novels, particularly The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, Sim focuses close attention on short stories such as 'The Mark on the Wall', 'Solid Objects', and 'Blue & Green'; nonfiction works, including 'On Being Ill', 'Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-car', and 'A Sketch of the Past'; and Woolf's diaries. Sim concludes with an account of Woolf's ontology of the ordinary, which illuminates the role of the everyday in Woolf's ethics.

Political and social change during Woolf's lifetime led her to address the role of the state and the individual. Michael H. Whitworth shows how ideas and images from contemporary novelists, philosophers, theorists, and scientists fuelled her writing, and how critics, film-makers, and novelists have reinterpreted her work for later generations.

This book analyses the representation of the past and the practice of historiography in the fiction and critical writings of Virginia Woolf, and draws parallels between Woolf's historiographical imagination and the thought of Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher of history and key theorist of modernity.