1st Edition

Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel The Corporeum of Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore

By Renée Dickinson Copyright 2009
    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    204 Pages
    by Routledge

    This study considers the work of two experimental British women modernists writing in the tumultuous interwar period--Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore--by examining four crucial incarnations of female embodiment and subjectivity: female bodies, geographical imagery, national ideology and textual experimentation. Dickinson proposes that the ways Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves by Virginia Woolf and Spleen and Fugue by Olive Moore reflect, expose and criticize physical, geographical and national bodies in the narrative and form of their texts reveal the authors’ attempts to try on new forms and experiment with new possibilities of female embodiment and subjectivity.

    Introduction: Articulating the Corporeum: Formulating the Feminine and Illuminating the Images of Physical, Geographical, National, and Textual Embodiment 1 The Shape of Modernism: Female Embodiment and Textual Experimentation in Mrs. Dalloway 2 Exposure and Development: Re-imagining Narrative and Nation in the Interludes of Virginia Woolf's The Waves 3 Modernist Con(tra)ceptions: Re-conceiving Body and Text in Olive Moore's Spleen 4 Flight of the Feminine and Textual Orientation in Olive Moore's Fugue Epilogue: Feminine Form and Textual Reform

    Biography

    Renee Dickinson is an Assistant Professor at Radford University.

    "Her [Dicksinson] contribution to Woolf studies would be reason enough to invest in this volume, but her recovery of Olive Moore-a novelist about whom very little is know and whose works, with the expection of Spleen, are currently out of print-makes Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel essential reading for any scholar who research focuses on British women modernists."
    -- April Pelt, University of Delaware, Tusla Studies in Women's Literature, Spring 2010