NUMBER 85 SPRING 2014 To the Readers: Woolf and Materiality materialist feminism (Barrett, Marcus, Goldman). – TABLE of CONTENTS – See page 10 Studies of the socio-historical import of Woolf’s In “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf notoriously writing have also added much to understandings designates the term “materialists” to describe International Virginia Woolf of the extent to which they are concerned with the failure of Edwardian writers to present “life Society Column material contexts (Zwerdling, Bradshaw). And, See page 48 itself” (Essays 4 159-61). Arnold Bennett, H. G. in recent years, critics have broadened the scope Officers and Members-at-Large Wells, and John Galsworthy disappoint because of Woolf’s materialism, finding that materiality is See page 47 “they are concerned not with the spirit but with central to: her engagement with realist philosophy the body” (158). But Woolf is not here endorsing (Banfield); her depiction of objects and “things” – EVENTS, INFO and CFPs– a transcendental spiritual life in opposition to an (Brown); her fascination with clothes and fashion immanently embodied one; she clarifies later that About MLA 2015 in Vancouver See page 3 (Koppen); her interest in the natural sciences “life or spirit, truth or reality […] the essential (Henry, Alt); and her theorizing of animality and thing” all escape the Edwardian writers precisely “life itself” (Ryan). “Intellectual freedom depends because they fail to express how all of these 2015 Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf upon material things,” but the material things that things are always already intertwined (160). It Virginia Woolf and are important to Woolf’s writing are clearly vaster becomes clear that what Woolf dislikes, what she Her Female Contemporaries than “money and a room of one’s own” (AROO associates with “materialists,” is not the fact they See page 3 141). engage with the materiality of life, but that they do not. Their materiality is not alive; it is a stolid Louisville Conference This special issue explores the multiple modes and stagnant materiality; it is mundane, bland: “If 2014 panel session report & 2015 CFP of materiality that Woolf engages across the we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on See page 4 span of her writing life. Essays consider how which is one word materialists, we mean by it that Woolf forges connections between history and they write of unimportant things; that they spend IN MEMORIAM place, subject and object, language and visual immense skill and immense industry making Thomas C. Caramagno art. In doing so, they outline the significance of the trivial and the transitory appear the true and see page 7 a diverse and often surprising range of objects enduring” (159). Materiality matters too much to Joanna Lipking and materials to Woolf’s modernist aesthetics. life to be reduced to the “trivial.” see pages 8 & 9 These include: potatoes, postcards and the printing press; mantelpieces and men’s clothing; What Woolf finds inadequate in the Edwardians About the Virginia Woolf Miscellany waxworks, x-rays, and animal skulls. The essays is not, then, their focus on the material world, Editorial note: While previously published work also show how exploring “Woolf and materiality” but the wayVirginia that “life” has become disentangled Woolfmay be submitted for consideration, bothMiscellany the transports us to many different environments— from this materiality. Woolf’s challenge for the original publication and any earlier versions must be acknowledged and cited in the text at the time of from Cornwall to the Hebrides, from Westminster modern writer to “[l]ook within,” to “[e]xamine an submission. Abbey to a Polytechnic lecture theatre—as well ordinary mind on an ordinary day,” is less about Guest Editors & CFPs as to various intellectual contexts—from French entering the enclosed sphere of the individual Issue #86—Fall 2014 Surrealism to German Phenomenology, from mind than it is a recognition that “life” is located Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield fashion theory to Medieval Latin. in the everyday entanglement of mind and matter: edited by Kathryn Simpson “The mind receives a myriad impressions […] <[email protected]> and The first two essays, by David Bradshaw and Jane Melinda Harvey an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” that <[email protected]> Goldman, illuminate how the relationship between “shape themselves into the life of Monday or politics and place, history and landscape, is central Tuesday” (160). For all the talk of “the dark places Issue #87—Spring 2015 to Woolf’s representation of the material world. of psychology” (162), Woolf is wary of being “1930s Woolf” This issue of VWM seeks contributions that In “The Blight of Class: Woolf and the ‘Lower “centred in a self which […] never embraces or explore Woolf’s relationship to the canonical Orders,’” Bradshaw argues that Woolf is attentive creates what is outside itself and beyond” (162). literature of the 1930s, such as but not limited to the poor and disadvantaged in a number of her Fiction should bring materiality and life—we to Auden’s poetry, Isherwood’s Berlin fiction, novels. Focusing in particular on working-class might say “granite and rainbow” (“The New Auden’s and Isherwood’s plays, Spender’s women in Woolf’s writing, he explains how Mrs. Biography,” E4 478)—together in an exploration commentary, and Waugh’s comedic novels. In addition, this issue encourages responses Pascoe’s encounter with Mrs. Durrant in Jacob’s of the life of materiality and the materiality of life. to the following questions: How does Woolf Room reveals that Woolf’s treatment of class scholarship, if at all, engage with the critical is layered in historical, cultural, and political Woolf’s writing abounds with examples of how study of 1930s literature? How does Woolf’s associations, including Cornwall’s potato blight life is embedded in the material world. Most modernism disrupt or complement the critical and the decline of the Cornish tin mining industry. understanding of 1930s literature? What can commonly cited, perhaps, is Woolf’s description From the granite county to the Hebrides, Goldman in A Room of One’s Own that “fiction is like a Woolf’s late fiction and essays reveal about the 1930s and its literature that the common recounts Woolf’s 1938 journey north of the border spider’s web” and that “these webs are not spun in scholarly narrative conceals or overlooks? to Scotland in “Two Postcards from Skye: Virginia mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work Send submissions of no more than 2500 words Woolf in the Hebrides.” The two postcards, of suffering human beings, and are attached to to: sent to Duncan Grant and Clive Bell, map the Erica Gene Delsandro grossly material things, like health and money and Scottish landscape Woolf encountered, following the houses we live in” (53). As critics have long <[email protected]> Deadline for submission: in the footsteps of James Boswell and Samuel commented, this is clear evidence of Woolf’s own August 1, 2014 Johnson. Discussing Woolf’s engagement with 1 the materiality of the postcards themselves, as well as with the material language with the materiality of art. Finally, the special issue closes with location from which they are sent, Goldman draws on a rich array of “Vanessa Discusses with Virginia the Limits of Fashion,” a poem by primal imagery to uncover their personal and aesthetic associations. Sandra Inskeep-Fox very much inspired by Woolf’s experiments with images and words, and with fact and fiction. Woolf’s thoughts about the material world were of course influenced by her life in London. But as well as the city streets that Woolf knew so Taken together, the contributions to this special issue richly and well, Leena Kore Schröder and Rachel Crossland detail two encounters variously demonstrate how Woolf’s writings continually challenge us Woolf had with specific objects that affected her view of materiality. to reconsider and renew what it means to be a “materialist.” Whether In “Waxing into Words: Virginia Woolf and the Funeral Effigies at engaging with places, objects, aesthetics, or politics, it is through her Westminster Abbey,” Kore Schröder recounts a trip to see waxwork exploration of a lively materiality that Woolf blazes the “paths” that figures at Westminster Abbey in 1905. This personal encounter informs “lead to fertile land” (E4 158). the waxworks that appear in numerous places in Woolf’s writings; crucially, as figures that are both material and intangible, they are objects Derek Ryan that helped her to think through the distinction between history and University of Kent narrative. It is this relation between the material and intangible that is also brought to the fore in Woolf’s interaction with science, as detailed Works Cited in “Exposing the Bones of Desire: Virginia Woolf’s X-ray Visions.” Alt, Christina. Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature. Cambridge: In this essay, Crossland describes a lecture on X-rays the then 14 year Cambridge UP, 2010. old Virginia Stephen accidentally attended in 1897, before shifting Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the from this personal encounter to discuss the implications of Woolf’s Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. wider references to X-rays in her writings, including how they expose Barrett, Michèle. Introduction. Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing. Ed. the solidity of those parts of the body that are out of view. Woolf’s Michèle Barrett. London: The Women’s Press, 1979. engagement with science provides her with a rich layer of imagery and Bradshaw, David. “‘Great Avenues of Civilization’: The Victoria metaphor for her modernist aesthetics. Embankment and Piccadilly Circus Underground Station in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Chelsea Embankment in Howards Central to many of the concerns above is the relation between subject End.” Transits: The Nomadic Geographies of Anglo-American and object in Woolf’s writing.