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This book identifies water as the key element of Virginia Woolf's modernist poetics. The various forms, movements, and properties of water inspired Woolf's writing of reality, time, and bodies and offered her an apt medium to reflect on the possibilities as well as on the exhaustion of her art. As a deeply intertextual writer, Woolf recognised how profoundly water has shaped human imagination and the landscape of the literary past. In line with recent ecocritical and ecofeminist assessments of her works, this book also shows Woolf's attraction to water as part of an indifferent nature that exists prior to and beyond the symbolic. Through close analyses that span the whole of Woolf's oeuvre, and that centre on the metaphorical and the material voices of water in her works, Modernist Waterscapes offers a fresh perspective on a writing that is as versatile as the element from which it draws. The monograph addresses postgraduate students and scholars working in modernist studies andWoolf studies in particular.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Virginia Woolf's Modernist Waterscapes.- 2. Aqueous Affinities: Woolf, Bachelard and the English Romantic Poets.- 3. 'How It Floats Me Afresh': Water in Woolf's Early Experimental Fiction.- 4. The Fluid Texture of Time: To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves.- 5. 'The Obscure Body of the Sea': Female Bodies, Water and Artistic Creation from The Voyage Out to The Waves.- 6. 'Floating Down a River into Silence': Water in Woolf's Later Works.- 7. Conclusion.
About the author
Marlene Dirschauer holds a PhD in Comparative Literature. Currently, she works as Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests are English modernism as well as religious writings of the early modern era.
Report
"The book is remarkably detailed and rigorous in its textual analysis. Dirschauer has clearly read widely in Woolf studies and in Woolf's oeuvre, and this study results in a richly layered and compelling argument ... . The breadth, attention, and density of Dirschauer's analyses are impressive. ... Modernist Waterscapes offers much of interest to Woolf scholars and modernist scholars interested in ecocriticism, feminist analysis, and literary history." (Amy Smith, (Amy C. Smith, Woolf Studies Annual, Vol. 30, 2024)
"Marlene Dirschauer's Modernist Waterscapes is one of several recent studies that take on board insights from the Blue Humanities and Ecocriticism, without giving up on the strengths of established formal, stylistic and rhetorical analyses of literary texts. [...] The strength of Dirschauer's study consists not only in such interpretations of Woolf's best-known works but in her engagement with the entire oeuvre, showing the ubiquity and breadth of Woolf's use of water, even in the dryness in Between the Acts expressive of the boundaries of human language. In the online version, the chapters of Modernist Waterscapes are available separately. However, this book is worthwhile reading in its entirety, to discover the whole panorama of Woolf's aquatic universe." (Virginia Richter, Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, Vol. 34 (3), 2023)
