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Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography
Maria Dibattista
€ 40.97
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Description for Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography
Hardback. Answers the question, 'how does one read an author', by undertaking an experiment in critical biography. This book 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. Num Pages: 232 pages. BIC Classification: 2AB; BGL; DSBH. Category: (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly. Dimension: 216 x 140 x 23. Weight in Grams: 371.
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.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2008
Publisher
Princeton University Press United States
Number of pages
208
Condition
New
Number of Pages
232
Place of Publication
New Jersey, United States
ISBN
9780691138121
SKU
V9780691138121
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Maria Dibattista
Maria DiBattista is professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton University. Her books include "Virginia Woolf's Major Novels" and "Fast-Talking Dames".
Reviews for Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography
"DiBatistta (Fast-Talking Dames) pieces together a portrait of Virginia Woolf as experienced by readers... For general fans of literary criticism or of Woolf's writing in particular, DiBattista's experiment will offer an intriguing perspective on Woolf's relationship to her art and her audience."
Publishers Weekly "Like Anne Fernald's Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader, DiBattista's study extends understanding not only of Woolf's craft and intellectual life but also of reading practices in general."
Choice "What interests Maria DiBattista is not who Woolf actually was
the flesh and blood woman
but the multiple personalities that emanate from her books. Reading a writer familiar to us is, in many ways, no different from seeing people we know, she says. In both cases, the person we think we know is a composite of the various facets of them we have glimpsed."
Fiona Capp, The Age "[W]hen people ask me about biographies about Woolf, I will recommend this one. Certainly, it cannot replace the more traditional biographies DiBattista acknowledges in her introduction, but it is an important supplement to them. My own understanding of the traditional biographies is more nuanced, a result of reading DiBattista's book."
Molly Youngkin, English Literature in Transition "[T]his short book is full of insights... I recommend it to you; it is a pleasure to read."
Stuart N. Clarke, Virginia Woolf Bulletin "[T]he more vivid impressions generated by DiBattista's study: namely, the reader's sensation of having been shown 'Virginia's Room' in a new light, as well as the realization that Woolf's 'room of one's own' is now a multitude of rooms, imaginative spaces where her readers have the freedom to hang looking-glasses in whatever odd corners they may choose."
Rosemary Joyce, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
Publishers Weekly "Like Anne Fernald's Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader, DiBattista's study extends understanding not only of Woolf's craft and intellectual life but also of reading practices in general."
Choice "What interests Maria DiBattista is not who Woolf actually was
the flesh and blood woman
but the multiple personalities that emanate from her books. Reading a writer familiar to us is, in many ways, no different from seeing people we know, she says. In both cases, the person we think we know is a composite of the various facets of them we have glimpsed."
Fiona Capp, The Age "[W]hen people ask me about biographies about Woolf, I will recommend this one. Certainly, it cannot replace the more traditional biographies DiBattista acknowledges in her introduction, but it is an important supplement to them. My own understanding of the traditional biographies is more nuanced, a result of reading DiBattista's book."
Molly Youngkin, English Literature in Transition "[T]his short book is full of insights... I recommend it to you; it is a pleasure to read."
Stuart N. Clarke, Virginia Woolf Bulletin "[T]he more vivid impressions generated by DiBattista's study: namely, the reader's sensation of having been shown 'Virginia's Room' in a new light, as well as the realization that Woolf's 'room of one's own' is now a multitude of rooms, imaginative spaces where her readers have the freedom to hang looking-glasses in whatever odd corners they may choose."
Rosemary Joyce, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature