Edited collection from acclaimed contemporary Woolf scholars, focusing on urban issues. These include addressing the ethical and political implications of Virginia Woolf’s work, a move that suggests new insights into Woolf as a “real world” social critic.

To Virginia Woolf, London was a source of creative inspiration, a setting for many of her works, and a symbol of the culture in which she lived and wrote. In a 1928 diary entry, she observed, "London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets." The city fascinated Woolf, yet her relationship with it was problematic. In her attempts to resolve her developmental struggles as a woman write in a patriarchal society, Woolf shaped and reshaped the image and meaning of London. Using psychoanalytic, feminist, and social theories, Susan Squier explores the transformed meaning of the city in Woolf's essays, memoirs, and novels as it functions in the creation of a mature feminist vision. Squier shows that Woolf's earlier works depict London as a competitive patriarchal environment that excluded her, but her mature works portray the city as beginning to accept the force of female energy. Squier argues that this transformation was made possible by Woolf's creative ability to appropriate and revise the masculine literary and cultural forms of her society. The act of writing, or "scene making," allowed Woolf to break from her familial and cultural heritage and recreate London in her own literary voice and vision. Virginia Woolf and London is based on analyses of Woolf's memoirs, her little-known early and mature London essays, Night and Day, Mrs. Dalloway, Flush, and The Years. By focusing on Woolf's changing attitudes about the city, Squier is able to define Woolf's evolving belief that women could "reframe" the city-scape and use it to imagine and create a more egalitarian world. Squier's study offers significant new insights into the interplay between self and society as it shapes the work of a woman writer. Originally published in 1985. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Virginia Woolf began writing reviews for the Guardian 'to make a few pence' from her father's death in 1904, and continued until the last decade of her life. The result is a phenomenal collection of articles, of which this selection offers a fascinating glimpse, which display the gifts of a dazzling social and literary critic as well as the development of a brilliant and influential novelist. From reflections on class and education, to slyly ironic reviews, musings on the lives of great men and 'Street Haunting', a superlative tour of her London neighbourhood, this is Woolf at her most thoughtful and entertaining.

This collection of essays inspired by the celebrated writer's favorite walks is available in its entirety for the first time in North America. 96 p p.

The dramatic story of the rise and collapse of Europe's first great urban experiment The growth of cities around the world in the last two centuries is the greatest episode in our urban history, but it is not the first. Three thousand years ago most of the Mediterranean basin was a world of villages; a world without money or writing, without temples for the gods or palaces for the mighty. Over the centuries that followed, however, cities appeared in many places around the Inland Sea, built by Greeks and Romans, and also by Etruscans and Phoenicians, Tartessians and Lycians, and many others. Most were tiny by modern standards, but they were the building blocks of all the states and empires of antiquity. The greatest--Athens and Corinth, Syracuse and Marseilles, Alexandria and Ephesus, Persepolis and Carthage, Rome and Byzantium--became the powerhouses of successive ancient societies, not just political centers but also the places where ancient art and literatures were created and accumulated. And then, half way through the first millennium, most withered away, leaving behind ruins that have fascinated so many who came after. Based on the most recent historical and archaeological evidence, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities provides a sweeping narrative of one of the world's first great urban experiments, from Bronze Age origins to the demise of cities in late antiquity. Greg Woolf chronicles the history of the ancient Mediterranean city, against the background of wider patterns of human evolution, and of the unforgiving environment in which they were built. Richly illustrated, the book vividly brings to life the abandoned remains of our ancient urban ancestors and serves as a stark reminder of the fragility of even the mightiest of cities.

Edited collection from acclaimed contemporary Woolf scholars, focusing on urban issues. These include addressing the ethical and political implications of Virginia Woolf's work, a move that suggests new insights into Woolf as a "real world" and social critic.

This book looks at Virginia Woolf's various homes in Kensington, Richmond, and Bloomsbury, and her Sussex country retreats. It explains how the buildings and streets were far more to her than a home--London was a symbol of the vitality she attempted to put into her novels. This guidebook brings to life Woolf's city by tracing the footsteps of some of her characters, while giving a flesh and blood picture of her, impossible to find elsewhere. The book is illustrated with drawings of all Woolf's homes, and walking route maps.