Marlene Dirschauer

eBook, PDF

Modernist Waterscapes (eBook, PDF)

Water, Imagination and Materiality in the Works of Virginia Woolf

Beschreibung

"This deeply thoughtful phenomenological study makes a welcome move from

psychology to poetics in its original and illuminating account of Woolf's

imaginative engagement with 'waterscapes'. Ranging over all the forms of Woolf's

writing, Dirschauer contributes significantly to recent ecocritical readings of

Woolf, beautifully mapping a network which encompasses English Romantic

poets and Woolf's contemporaries."

- Mark Hussey, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Pace University, USA

"In Modernist Waterscapes Marlene Dirschauer has captured the complexity,

fullness, wonder, and fluid power of Woolf's writing....This is a profound and

delightfully illuminating study of Woolf's immersion in the literary past as she

creates radically new aesthetic forms that shape human connections with the

vast web of the biosphere and its natural forces. A necessary new book for

anyone interested in Virginia Woolf."

- Louise Westling, Professor Emerita of English and Environmental Studies at

the University of Oregon, USA

This book identifies water as the key element of Virginia Woolf's modernist

poetics. The various forms, movements, and properties of water inspired Woolf's

writing of reality, time, and bodies and offered her an apt medium to reflect on

the possibilities as well as on the exhaustion of her art. As a deeply intertextual

writer, Woolf recognised how profoundly water has shaped human imagination

and the landscape of the literary past. In line with recent ecocritical and

ecofeminist assessments of her works, this book also shows Woolf's attraction to

water as part of an indifferent nature that exists prior to and beyond the symbolic.

Through close analyses that span the whole of Woolf's oeuvre, and that centre on

the metaphorical and the material voices of water in her works, Modernist

Waterscapes offers a fresh perspective on a writing that is as versatile as the

element from which it draws. The monograph addresses students and scholars

working in modernist studies and Woolf studies in particular.

Marlene Dirschauer holds a PhD in Comparative Literature. Currently, she works

as Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests

are English modernism as well as religious writings of the early modern era.

• Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland
• Seitenzahl: 221
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. Januar 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9783031134210
• Artikelnr.: 67239041