Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History pp 162-176 | Cite as
A ‘Common History’: Anonymous Artists, Communal Collectivities
Abstract
As mentioned before, the first book Woolf proposed to write early in her career was a ‘solid’ historical book. ‘I am going to produce a real historical work this summer; for which I have solidly read and annotated 4 volumes of medieval English’, she writes to Violet Dickinson in 1905.2 However, she began such work only at the end of her life, while she was writing Between the Acts. Hers would be a ‘Common History’ of England, which signalled her continuous interest in and vindication of the lives and opinions of the ‘common’, exemplified by her two volumes of essays dedicated to The Common Reader.3 Woolf had planned to call her history book ‘Reading at Random’ or later ‘Turning the Page’ and to write it in the mode of literary history, drawing on memoirs, chronicles, (auto)biographies and histories alongside literary works. Of this work what evidence survives are the drafts and typescripts of its possible overall structure with the title ‘Notes for Reading at Random’, the first chapter entitled ‘Anon’ and the beginning of the second chapter called ‘The Reader’.4
Keywords
Literary Work Literary History Historical Book Common History Modern ArtistPreview
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Notes
- 1.Benjamin, ‘Literary History and the Study of Literature’ (1931), in Selected Writings 2, p. 464 (translation slightly modified).Google Scholar
- 2.Woolf, Letters I, July 1905, p. 202.Google Scholar
- 17.Virginia Woolf, ‘The Reader’ (1940), ed. Brenda Silver, Twentieth Century Literature 25. 3/4 (1979), p. 428.Google Scholar
- 18.Cf. Woolf, ‘Reading’, in Essays III, pp. 141–61. A transcript version of the essay ‘Byron and Mr Briggs’, appears as Appendix II, ibid., pp. 473–99. ‘Byron & Mr Briggs’ was intended as an introductory chapter to a proposed book, ‘Reading’, began in 1922, but eventually turned into The Common Reader: First Series (1925). Also see, Anne Fernald, Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 22.Woolf, ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ (1909), in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, pp. 69–82; cf. especially, p. 78.Google Scholar
- 33.Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Josué V. Harrari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 159.Google Scholar
- 35.Woolf, Three Guineas, in A Room, 1992 edn, p. 322.Google Scholar
- 47.Woolf, Writer’s Diary, 9, 22 June 1940, pp. 323, 325.Google Scholar
- 57.Woolf, ‘Notes on an Elizabethan Play’ (1925), in Collected Essays I, p. 56.Google Scholar
- 65.Baudelaire, ‘Correspondances’ (1857), in Complete Poems, p. 19.Google Scholar
- 67.See Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Exposé of 1935’, p. 4. It is worth noting, however, that Adorno criticized this formulation as being marred by an overestimation of the archaic that supported mythical thought, and an association between an archaic past and a golden age and the identification of the present as hell. See Theodore W. Adorno, ‘Letters to Benjamin’, in Ernst Bloch et al, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Ronald Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1977), pp. 113, 116.Google Scholar
- 68.‘Johann Jakob Bachofen’, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 3, ed. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland and Michel W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Others (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 12. Also cf. Löwy, ‘Revolution against “Progress”, p. 46; and Johann Jacob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of Johann Jacob Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).Google Scholar