Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Issue 93, Spring/Summer 2018
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NUMBERVirginia 93 Woolf Miscellany SPRING/SUMMER 2018 To the Readers: That Woolf would become a central figure in You can read the Miscellany contemporary biographical novels makes sense online on WordPress The first biofiction boom happened in the 1930s. since many of her aesthetic innovations and https://virginiawoolfmiscellany. Well-known authors like Robert Graves, Thomas experimentations set the stage for what would wordpress.com/ and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Arna evolve into the contemporary biographical novel. Bontemps, and Zora Neale Hurston are just a few – TABLE OF CONTENTS – But, ironically, Woolf could not imagine her way who published noteworthy biographical novels See page 11 to the aesthetic form. As Michael Lackey argues during the decade. But the surge waned, in part INTERNATIONAL in his essay, for Woolf, naming a character after an because the Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács VIRGINIA WOOLF actual historical person mandates that the author condemned the aesthetic form as an irredeemable SOCIETY COLUMN represent the figure with as much precision and mistake in his landmark study The Historical See page 60 accuracy as possible. This stands in stark contrast Novel (1937). This decline led many, especially IVWS OFFICERS AND to what contemporary biographical novelists do, academics, to dismiss the biographical novel as MEMBERS-AT-LARGE which is to appropriate the life of the biographical a frivolous and/or inferior “literary” form. As See page 60 subject in order to express their own vision of life the critic Carl Bode says in a 1955 essay: “the and the world. In other words, authors of biofiction EVENTS AND CFPS: biographical novel deserves more to be pitied use rather than represent the biographical subject, so than censured” (269). Irving Stone was extremely IVWS panel MLA Chicago 2019 they are very comfortable changing facts about the sensitive to this criticism, which only stands to IVWS Panel—2019 Louisville Conference historical figure, which is something Woolf could reason, as he published many popular biographical not do. novels from the 1930s through the 1980s. Note CFP for the 2020 Louisville Conference Stone’s frustrated tone in his 1957 lecture “The 29th Annual Conference on Todd Avery clarifies how epistemological and Biographical Novel”: “I would like at this moment Virginia Woolf aesthetic innovations among Bloomsbury writers to interject, with less bitterness than puzzlement, 30th Annual Conference on contributed to the rise of biofiction. According I hope, the question of why the historical novel, Virginia Woolf to Avery, history came to be defined as a science with its accurate background but fictional See page 3 during the nineteenth century. But for someone characters, should have been more acceptable to the CFP and the Essay for the IVWS like Lytton Strachey, this scientific approach to academicians than the biographical novel, which is Annual Angelica Garnett history would only give readers access to the accurate not only in background but in the people Undergraduate Essay Prize mechanical operations of societies and cultures. involved?” (129). See page 7 To access and represent human minds, it is art About the rather than science that is necessary, which is why Having died in 1989, Stone did not witness the Virginia Woolf Miscellany Strachey concludes that “the only possible way biofiction boom of the 1990s, which featured works See page 5 for Editorial Policies of narrating the characteristics of human minds is from luminaries like Joanna Scott, J.M. Coetzee, by the aid of—not the scientific—but the artistic Margaret Atwood, Charles Johnson, Russell Banks, Call for Assistant and Associate Editors for the Virginia Woolf Miscellany method” (15). Thinking of history more in terms and Joyce Carol Oates, just to mention a notable See page 9 of art than science set Strachey on an aesthetic few. But it was Michael Cunningham’s 1998 journey that would move increasingly more. towars biographical novel about Virginia Woolf that marks SPECIAL TOPICS & CFPS Issue 95 Spring 2019 biofiction, a point that is seen most clearly from a major turning point. Cunningham won the Pulitzer the preface of Strachey’s landmark study Eminent Prize in fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Collecting Virginia Woolf Guest Editor: Catherine Hollis Victorians: “Human beings are too important to be Fiction, and The Hours was made into an Oscar- [email protected] treated as mere symptoms of the past.” Strachey winning film in 2002. Since then, biofiction has Submisisons due would develop this idea further over the course become a dominant literary form. Therefore, when 30 November 2018 of his career, culminating in the book Elizabeth discussing the rise and legitimization of biofiction, and Essex, which, as Avery claims, “Strachey Issue 96 Fall 2019 Woolf is a figure of central importance, and this is deliberately approached […] in a biofictional spirit” the case for many reasons. Reading, Fast And Slow: Centennial Musings by “intentionally” manipulating and inventing “historical facts in the service of an intensely Gillian Freeman, Susan Sellers, Priya Parmar, on the Early Novels personal vision” (16). Norah Vincent, and Maggie Gee have published Guest Editor: Rebecca Duncan [email protected] biographical novels about Woolf. But Woolf’s An intensely personal vision of Virginia Woolf is presence is not restricted to works with her as the Submissions due 1 May 2019 precisely what Sandra Inskeep-Fox offers in her protagonist. In 1997, Anita Diamant published The contribution, the poem “Angels Musing at My Red Tent, a novel about the figure of Dinah from the Issue 97 Spring 2020 Expense.” In this poem, the speaker’s mother and Virginia Woolf: Mobilizing Emotion, Old Testament. In an interview, Diamant explains Virginia Woolf, the eponymous “angel muses,” Feeling, and Affect how her novel was the logical product of Woolf’s “enjoy [...] yet another comfortable chat / At work: “My book tries to answer the questions Guest Editor: Celiese Lypka [email protected]. my expense.” As these muses talk in an endless Virginia Woolf posed in A Room of One’s Own. conversation, the speaker experiences an epiphany What was life like for her [Dinah]? How many Submissions due: 29 September 2019 that elegantly and cleverly captures the driving children? Did she have a room of her own, which is impulse behind contemporary biofiction: both See page 10 for more information to say, time and space to reflect?” (110). mother and Woolf are “part and part of me.” This 1 is a metabiofictional moment that, in blurring any presumed boundary assumes that vital “truth” resides not only in a life, but in the writing between writer and subject, also reveals Inskeep-Fox’s incisive of that life: “we read biofiction,” she writes, at the conclusion of this awareness of how biofiction serves the writer’s, and not the subject’s, inventive take on both “trans” and “bio,” “not as fiction about a life personal vision. lived but as part of the writing of that life.” Both Orlando and Man into Woman confirm that “life writing is not about—or not primarily about— Michael Schrimper takes up this same theme, but from a different the ‘factually correct’ but about the imaginatively and emotionally true.” angle. He wonders how Woolf would have responded to her presence in contemporary biofiction. The tendency for scholars of biofiction could If biofiction captures truths unavailable to documentary evidence or be to focus on the celebrated author. But taking his cue from Woolf, to scientific methods of historiography, it also engages in a retroactive Schrimper argues that the primary subject of biofiction about Woolf shaping of the past. Using Anne Freadman’s work on “uptake,” which is should not be the character but the author’s work, because, for Woolf, a process of appropriating and thereby inflecting an originary author and what really matters in literature is not the personality or mystique or text, Olivia Wood clarifies not how Woolf and her novelMrs. Dalloway celebrity or even the identity of the writer. Rather, it is the “work work,” determine the shape and form of Cunningham’s The Hours, but how as Woolf says. Schrimper reminds us of biofiction’s prerogative to The Hours impacts and refigures Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway. Wood’s express the vision of its author, but he asks readers to heed Woolf’s tacit, argument recalls T. S. Eliot’s claim about the relationship of past and anticipatory advice to readers of biofiction, and to focus our attention present in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where he observes that not on the subject, even when the subject is Woolf, but on contemporary with genuinely new work “the past [is] altered by the present as much as authors’ use of and engagement with the subject’s “work work.” the present is directed by the past” (50). Wood illustrates how this genre theory can open up new ways of thinking about the role biofiction plays Biofiction appropriates a subject’s life and works by way of revealing in engaging and even reshaping both precursor authors and texts. a personal vision, regardless of the factual accuracy of the portrayal. But is such appropriation morally acceptable? On the other hand, is the Many biofictions about Woolf have been authored since 1998. But the question of morality even the right question to ask, if the very act of scholarship is only now starting to register what writers have done speaking or writing about, or performing, the subject belies even the with Woolf’s life and to clarify how Woolf and her contemporaries possibility of perfect factual accuracy? Is it fair to accuse a writer of contributed to the making and subsequent valorization of biofiction.The factual infidelity if the expressive act always inevitably transforms the contributions to this special issue about Woolf and biofiction are merely historical subject, making each new representation of Virginia Woolf the beginning of what promises to be a lively and rich field of study.