Circulating Ideas and Selling Periodicals: Leonard Woolf, the Nation and Athenaeum, and Topical Debat

Abstract

Throughout their careers as authors, journalists, and publishers, Virginia and Leonard Woolf wrote and published hundreds of books, reviews, articles, and essays that might be considered polemical, whether the subject was art, literature, criticism, international politics, feminism, education, or the publishing industry, to name a handful of their most frequently engaged topics. Despite the strength of their opinions, both Woolfs believed in the power and importance of debate, and both approached their polemical writing with the acknowledgment, explicit or implied, that critical dialogue is necessary to arbitrate among invariably multiple points of view. However, while they shared some common goals with their polemical writing, their respective approaches to written dialogue were distinct. Virginia Woolf’s essay style, argues Melba Cuddy-Keane, is dialogic; in Woolf’s words, a “ ‘turn&turn about method’ ” engages multiple sides of a critical discussion within the same essay, encouraging her readers to situate their own thinking in terms of the larger debate (qtd. in Cuddy-Keane 132–36). Rather than straightforwardly articulating a single position in her essays, Virginia Woolf frequently used a sophisticated internal dialogic style addressing the merits of multiple perspectives on a single topic. Leonard Woolf, in contrast, typically aimed in his critical writing to be conventionally persuasive; he outlined his argument clearly and precisely.