1st Edition

Virginia Woolf’s Good Housekeeping Essays

By Christine Reynier Copyright 2019
    188 Pages
    by Routledge

    188 Pages
    by Routledge

    In the mid-twentieth century, Virginia Woolf published ‘Six Articles on London Life’ in Good Housekeeping magazine, a popular magazine where fashion, cookery and house decoration is largely featured. This first book-length study of what Woolf calls ‘little articles’ proposes to reassess the commissioned essays and read them in a chronological sequence in their original context as well as in the larger context of Woolf’s work. Drawing primarily on literary theory, intermedial studies, periodical studies and philosophy, this volume argues the essays which provided an original guided tour of London are creative and innovative works, combining several art forms while developing a photographic method. Further investigation examines the construct of Woolf’s essays as intermedial and as partaking both of theory and praxis; intermediality is closely connected here with her defense of a democratic ideal, itself grounded in a dialogue with her forebears. Far from being second-rate, the Good Housekeeping essays bring together aesthetic and political concerns and come out as playing a pivotal role: they redefine the essay as intermedial, signal Woolf’s turn to a more openly committed form of writing, and fit perfectly within Woolf’s essayistic and fictional oeuvre which they in turn illuminate.



    Contents





     



    Introduction



    Woolf’s essays and their critical appraisal.



    Woolf’s essays in Good Housekeeping magazine. Composition, publication, reception



    The purpose of the book





    Part I: The Good Housekeeping Essays as Intermedial essays





    Chapter One



    The humble art of description in the ‘Six Articles on London life’



    Introduction



    The documentary impulse



    Practicing the art of description in ‘The Docks of London’ and ‘Oxford Street Tide’



    Renewing the art of description in Good Housekeeping magazine



    Developing the ‘critical attitude’



    Conclusion





    Chapter Two



    The Art of photography in the Good Housekeeping essays



    ‘The Docks of London’ as an apparatus for the other essays



    The photographic method in ‘Great Men’s Houses’



    The photographic method in ‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’





    Chapter Three



    The art of architecture in the Good Housekeeping essays



    Redefining architecture as democracy in ‘This is the House of Commons’ and ‘Portrait of a Londoner’



    Intermediality and Woolf’s ethics of doubt



    Constructing the essay as an intermedial form





    Part II: ‘The Common Pool’





    Chapter Four





    Woolf’s ghosts in the Good Housekeeping essays



    Woolf’s plea for democracy: a dialogue with her forebears



    The intermedial dialogue with John Ruskin



    ‘Adaptive reuse’ and the political debates of the 1930s





    Chapter Five



    Virginia Woolf and Heritage



    Woolf’s survival theory



    Poverty as usus: the ‘common pool’



    An ethical posture?



    Poverty as an economic and aesthetic concept



    Woolf and Benjamin





    Part III Reassessing the Good Housekeeping essays





    Chapter 6



    The Good Housekeeping essays as cultural and creative essays



    The Good Housekeeping essays as part and parcel of Woolf’s essays



    The theoretical thrust of Woolf’s essays



    Woolf’s ‘humble’ theory





    Chapter Seven



    The Good Housekeeping essays at the crossroads



    The photographic turn



    Implementing the theory of usus



    Constructing history as trace



    The political turn





    Conclusion



    The Good Housekeeping essays and The Arcades Project



    Straddling the divide between high and low culture

    Biography

    Christine Reynier is Professor of English Literature at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France. She is the author of Virginia Woolf's Ethics of the Short Story (Palgrave 2009) and a number of articles on modernist writers (Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, etc.). She is co-editor (with M. Duyck and M. Basseler) of Reframing the Modernist Short Story (Journal of the Short Story in English, 2015) and (with B. Coste and C. Delyfer) of Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism (Routledge, 2017).