Abstract
Ezra Pound’s injunction to ‘Make it New’ seems still to encapsulate the consensual critical view of literary modernism’s aesthetic imperative.1 Although recent research has comprehensively demonstrated the engagement of modernist writers with the social issues of their day, there has been little interrogation of the prevailing assumption that modernism is characterised by its rejection of past forms, especially realism. Woolf criticism, certainly, seems caught in this historiographical inertia, despite the recent focus upon the cultural contexts of her writing.2 Linden Peach, in his illuminating study of Woolf’s historical perspective (2000), reiterates the prevailing orthodoxy: ‘The Years, despite its apparent concessions to social realism, … can be seen in terms of her quarrel with realism in her essay “Modern Fiction” (1919).’ For Peach, Woolf’s work is anti-realist in that it is ‘located at the very juncture between deconstruction and New Historicism’.3
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Notes and reference
E. Pound (1934) Make It New (London: Faber & Faber).
Recent cultural studies of Woolf include M. Cuddy-Keane (2003) Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
A. Snaith (2000) Public and Private Negotiations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan);
M. Whitworth (2005) Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
D. Bradshaw (2000) ‘Introduction’, in V. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. D. Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
among the discussions to consider Woolf and realism, see, S. Dick (2000) ‘Literary Realism in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves’, in S. Roe and S. Sellers (eds), Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 50–71;
S. P. Rosenbaum (1971) ‘The philosophical realism of Virginia Woolf’, in S. P. Rosenbaum (ed.), English Literature and British Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press);
A. Zwerdling (1986) Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press).
L. Peach (2000) Virginia Woolf (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 169 and 3.
I take this term from Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy of Critical Realism. See R. Bhaskar and M. Hartwig (2010) The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective (London: Routledge), pp. 51–73,
and A. Collier (1994) Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy (London: Verso).
G. Lukács (1950) Studies in European Realism, trans. E. Bone (London: Merlin Press), p. 60.
B. Brecht (1977) ‘Popularity and Realism’, in R. Taylor (ed.), Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso), p. 82.
V. Woolf (1940; 2003) Roger Fry: A Biography (London: Vintage), p. 152.
F. Jameson (1977) ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, in R. Taylor (ed.), Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso), p. 198.
V. Woolf (1966) Collected Essays, ed. L. Woolf, 4 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus), vol. 1, p. 249.
R. Jakobson (1956) ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance’, in R. Jakobson and M. Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton), p. 78.
See also R. Jakobson (1960) ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in T. A. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language (London: Wiley).
R. Barthes (1990) S/Z, trans. R. Miller (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 4–5.
J. Derrida (1982) ‘White Mythologies: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in A. Bass (trans.) Margins of Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester Press), p. 226.
V. Woolf (2000) Mrs Dalloway, ed. D. Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 120. Subsequent references in the text are to this edition.
D. Boucher (ed.) (1997) The British Idealists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. xxi–ii.
L. Stephen (1893) ‘Ethics and the Struggle for Existence’, Contemporary Review, LXIV, 155–70.
For an account of the influence of Russell on Woolf, see A. Banfield (2000) The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
B. Russell (2007) Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (Nottingham: Spokesman), p. 15.
B. Russell (1959) The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 92–3.
R. Barthes (1960) ‘The Reality Effect’, in T. Todorov, French Literary Theory, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 11–17.
B. Latour (2004) ‘Why has Critique Run out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, in B. Brown (ed.) Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 158.
See K. Czarnecki and C. Rohman (eds) (2011) Virginia Woolf and the Natural World (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press), for essays on flowers in Mrs Dalloway and elsewhere.
For further discussion of the metonymic trace of cars in Mrs Dalloway see P. Morris (2013) ‘Woolf and Realism’, in J. Goldman and B. Randall (eds), Woolf in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 40–51.
J. B. S. Haldane (1924) Daedalus or Science and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner), pp. 10, 40–3.
J. Uglow (2005) A Little History of British Gardening (London: Pimlico), p. 255.
M. Campbell-Culver (2001) The Origin of Plants (London: Transworld), p. 356.
Quoted in M. Thomson (1998) The Problems of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 47.
Thomson (1998), pp. 120–4; E. Shorter (1997) A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: Wiley), pp. 65–6, 143.
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Morris, P. (2014). Virginia Woolf and Metonymic Realism: Making It New?. In: Parrinder, P., Nash, A., Wilson, N. (eds) New Directions in the History of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_10
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