Virginia Woolf’s Essayism
Virginia Woolf’s Essayism by Randi Saloman, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2014, explores the intricate relationship between Woolf’s essays and her fiction. This edition, comprising 184 pages, delves into how Woolf utilized techniques from the essay genre—such as fragmentation and stream-of-consciousness—to transcend the realism characteristic of 19th-century novels. Saloman references influential theorists like T. W. Adorno and Georg Lukács, alongside contemporary scholars of ‘essayism,’ to illustrate how the essay form significantly influenced Woolf’s literary output.
Readers will find an in-depth examination of Woolf’s shorter essays, along with revisionary insights into works such as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. The book also presents new interpretations of both her major and lesser-known novels, including The Pargiters, which was intended as an ‘essay-novel.’ Saloman argues for the essay’s pivotal role as a modernist genre, asserting its impact on the development of modern fiction. This scholarly work contributes to the fields of literary criticism and literary collections, particularly within the context of European literature.
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The focus of this study is on Virginia Woolf’s vast output of essays and their relation to her fiction. Randi Saloman shows that it was by employing tools and methods drawn from the essay genre – such as fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness and dialogic engagement with the reader – that Woolf managed to leave behind the realism of the 19th-century novel. Saloman draws on key theorists of the essay such as T. W. Adorno and Georg Lukács, as well as on more recent scholars of ‘essayism’ (a term devised by Robert Musil to describe the hypothetical quality of the essay mode). She shows that the essay, as genre and mode, shaped Woolf’s writing, and modern fiction more generally, in ways that have not yet been articulated.
Key Features:
In-depth consideration of Virginia Woolf’s shorter essaysRevisionary accounts of /A Room of One’s Own/ (1929) and /Three Guineas/ (1938)New readings of Woolf’s major and less well-known novels, including /The Pargiters/, her failed ‘essay-novel’Repositions the essay as a major modernist genre, responsible in large part for the creation of the modern (and especially the ‘modernist’) novel
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