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How should we read the writings of Virginia Woolf? This is not so much a question of interpretation as of practice. How are we to read this writer for whom reading is an activity that requires almost the same talents and energies as the activity of writing itself ? For Woolf responds to the question...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge ; New York :
Cambridge University Press,
2012.
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| Series: | Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941. Works. 2011.
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| Online Access: | Cover image Contributor biographical information Publisher description Table of contents only |
| Summary: | How should we read the writings of Virginia Woolf? This is not so much a question of interpretation as of practice. How are we to read this writer for whom reading is an activity that requires almost the same talents and energies as the activity of writing itself ? For Woolf responds to the question, 'How should one read a book?', as a person of immense, virtuosic skill and experience in both activities. She understands the reader to be the 'fellow-worker and accomplice' (E5 573) of the writer. The 'quickest way to understand what a novelist is doing is not to read', she suggests, 'but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words' (E5 574); and 'the time to read poetry', she recognises, is 'when we are almost able to write it' (E5 577). Not only has Woolf left a richly rewarding oeuvre, but she has also left ample documentation of her meticulous processes of composition and of her detailed involvement in the production and publishing of many of her works, all of which her active and conscientious reader will wish to negotiate. If we are going to read Woolf creatively and critically, ifwe are to follow our own instincts, use our own reason and come to our own conclusions, as she herself advises, we need to read her works in a form that provides us with the fullest means possible to exercise these powers, one that gives us as much unmediated access as possible to the record of these processes. This Cambridge edition of Woolf's writings consequently aims to provide readers and scholars, Woolf's fellow-workers and accomplices, with an extensively researched, fully explicated and collated text. |
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| Physical Description: | cxii, 870 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 857-870). |
| ISBN: | 9780521845977 0521845971 |