Imagining Virginia Woolf
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A Room of One's Own
A Sketch of the Past
A01=Maria DiBattista
Aldous Huxley
Anecdote
Artistic merit
Author_Maria DiBattista
Bloomsbury Group
British humour
British Institution
Category=DNBL
Category=DSBH
Clarissa
Creative nonfiction
D. H. Lawrence
Dissociation of sensibility
Domestic tragedy
Droll
E. M. Forster
Egotism
Elaine Showalter
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Etymology
Euphemism
Even the Queen
Fanny Brawne
Fiction writing
George Eliot
Hyperbole
I. A. Richards
Idiot
Irony
J. D. Beresford
Jane Marcus
Jean Genet
Joseph Conrad
Leonard Woolf
Literature
Lytton Strachey
Malcolm Cowley
Marius the Epicurean
Mark Twain
Maurice Sendak
Memoir
Michel de Montaigne
Middlebrow
Mrs Dalloway
Mrs.
Nancy Mitford
Narrative
Novel
Novelist
On Being Ill
On the Eve
Parody
Physiognomy
Pierre Bayard
Pity
Platitude
Pun
Reader-response criticism
Samuel Beckett
Satire
Solipsism
Testimonial
The Bad Book
The Modern World (novel)
The Narrator
Thomas Browne
Tragedy
Virginia Woolf
William Shakespeare
Women in Love
Woolf
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691138121
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 18 Jan 2009
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Maria DiBattista is professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton University. Her books include "Virginia Woolf's Major Novels" and "Fast-Talking Dames".
