Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Reading (AAEC055)
Level: 6, Credits: 15
Teaching Method: Two-hour seminar
Convenor: Professor Anna Snaith, Room VWB 7.39, ext. 2174,
[email protected]
Semester One
Assessment: 4000 word essay (topics to be devised by students in consultation
with course leader): 90%
Oral Seminar Presentation and written summary: 10%
Course Description: Virginia Woolf is one of the most iconic writers of the
twentieth century. Her image continues to circulate in contemporary culture, a
ready signifier of experimental modernism, bohemian London, 1970s feminism,
pacifism, madness, and the drive to suicide. She is a writer who has generated
an enormous amount of critical and popular attention, her oft-controversial status
a result of her interest in culturally troubling questions, those that still preoccupy
us in the twenty-first century. This course will treat a range of Woolf’s work via a
focus on reading: both the ways in which she has been read and her own politics
of reading. Woolf’s investment in the ‘common reader’ and her related concern
with reading publics, public libraries, education and the politics of language make
her uniquely situated in the context of the modernist avant garde. We will study a
selection of her work across a range of genres, always paying close attention to
the historical and political contexts out of which her writing emerged. Her
engagement with the politics of difference – class, gender, race, sexuality – will
form another thread throughout the course. We will explore the ways in which her
experiments in aesthetics intersect with her political concerns. New ways of living
and new ways of writing go hand in hand for Woolf.
NB The key primary texts will be supplemented by primary and secondary
material provided on KEATS (King’s elearning service).
Week One: Introduction: Reading Woolf and Woolf Reading [material in handout
on KEATS]
Week Two: Empire: The Voyage Out (1915)
Week Three: Education: Jacob’s Room (1922)
Week Four: Urban Spaces: Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Week Five: Feminism: A Room Of One’s Own (1929)
Week Six: Reading Week
Week Seven: Biography: Flush (1933)
Week Eight: The Common Reader: selected essays
Week Nine: History: The Years (1937)
Week Ten: Fascism: Three Guineas (1938)
Bibliography
Primary Texts:
Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. Ed. Lorna Sage. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001.
-----. Jacob’s Room. Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
-----. Mrs Dalloway. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
-----. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Ed. Anna Snaith. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015.
-----. Flush. Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
-----. The Years. Ed. Jeri Johnson. London: Penguin, 1998.
-----. Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008.
See also The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols); The Letters of Virginia Woolf (6
vols), The Essays of Virginia Woolf (5 vols).
Weekly Supplementary Reading (available via KEATS or online):
Week One (Introduction):
 ‘Introduction’, Brenda Silver, Virginia Woolf: Icon (pp. 4-12)
 Virginia Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ (1926)
 Two letters to Woolf from readers of A Room of One’s Own and Three
Guineas
Week Two (The Voyage Out):
 Jed Esty, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Colony and the Adolescence of Modernist
Fiction’ in Modernism and Colonialism ed Begam and Valdez Moses
Week Three (Jacob’s Room):
 Woolf, ‘Why?’ in Selected Essays
Week Four (Mrs Dalloway):
 Scott Cohen, ‘The Empire from the Street: Virginia Woolf, Wembley and
Imperial Monuments’, Modern Fiction Studies 50.1(2004): 85-109.
Week Five (A Room of One’s Own):
 Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, ‘Sexual Identity and “A Room of One’s Own”:
“Secret Economies” in Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Discourse’, Signs
14.3(1989): 634-50.
Week Seven (Flush):
 Pamela Caughie, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism, Chapter 5.
Week Eight (The Common Reader):
 Extracts from Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the
Public Sphere (2003).
Week Nine (The Years)
 Extracts from the manuscript drafts (The Pargiters)
Week Ten (Three Guineas)
 Extracts from ‘The Three Guineas Letters’, Woolf Studies Annual 6 (2000)

Merry Pawlowski, ‘Exposing Masculine Spectacle: Virginia Woolf’s
Newspaper Clippings for Three Guineas as Contemporary Cultural History
(online)
Reference Works:
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989.
Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A to Z. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
McNees, Eleanor, ed. Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments. 4 vols. Sussex: Helm
Information, 1994.
Snaith, Anna (ed). Palgrave Advances in Woolf Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2007.
Woolf Studies Annual. New York. Pace University Press.
Secondary Reading:
Allen, Judith. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language. Edinburgh University
Press, 2010.
Alt, Christina. Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature. Cambridge University
Press, 2010.
Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of
Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Barrett, Eileen and Patricia Cramer, eds. Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings. New
York: New York University Press, 1997.
Beer, Gillian. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1996.
Black, Naomi. Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Bowlby, Rachel. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.
Bradshaw, David. “Hyams Place: The Years, the Jews and the British Union of
Fascists.” In Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History,
edited by Maroula Joannou, 179-191. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1999.
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. London: Allen Lane, 2005.
-----Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and
Question of Itself. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Dalgarno, Emily. Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language. Cambridge
University Press, 2012.
Daugherty, Beth Rigel, ed. “Virginia Woolf’s ‘How Should One Read A Book?’”
Woolf Studies Annual 4(1998): 123-185.
-----, ed. “Letters from Readers to Virginia Woolf.” Woolf Studies Annual 12
(2006): 1-212.
-----. “Virginia Woolf Teaching/Virginia Woolf Learning: Morley College and the
Common Reader.” In New Essays on Virginia Woolf, edited by Helen
Wussow, 61-77. Dallas: Contemporary Research Press, 1995.
DeGay, Jane. Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh University
Press, 2006.
DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making. Totowa
NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980.
Dubino, Jeanne (ed). Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace. Palgrave
2011.
Dusinberre, Juliet. Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common
Reader? London: Macmillan, 1997.
Ellis, Steve. Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.
Fernald, Anne. Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader. London: Macmillan,
2006.
Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf & the Bloomsbury Avant Garde: War,
Civilization, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
-----. ‘Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia
Woolf’s The Voyage Out’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 5.1(1986): 6390.
De Gay, Jane. Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Gillespie, Diane. The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and
Vanessa Bell. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1988.
Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, PostImpressionism and the Politics of the Visual. New York and Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
-----. Modernism, 1910-1945: Image to Apocalypse. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003.
Harris, Alexandra. Virginia Woolf. Thames and Hudson, 2011.
Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa
Bell, Photography and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2002.
-----. The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 2010.
Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1991.
Koppen, R. S. Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity. Edinburgh
University Press, 2009.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996.
Levenback, Karen. Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1999.
Light, Alison. Mrs Woolf and the Servants. London: Viking, 2006.
Marcus, Jane. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987.
-----. Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2004.
----- ed. New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1981.
-----. Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1983.
Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.
Pawlowski, Merry M. “Reassessing Modernism: Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas,
and Fascist Ideology.” Woolf Studies Annual 1 (1995): 47-67.
----- ,ed. Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators’ Seduction.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
Peach, Linden. Virginia Woolf . Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
Phillips, Kathy. Woolf Against Empire. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee
Press, 1994.
Radin, Grace. Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1981.
Reinhold, Natalya, ed. Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace University Press,
2004.
Rosenberg, Beth Carole and Jeanne Dubino, eds. Virginia Woolf and the Essay.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.
Saloman, Randi, Virginia Woolf’s Essayism. Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
Sellers, Susan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2010.
Sim, Lorraine, Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience. Ashgate,
2010.
Silver, Brenda. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1999.
Snaith, Anna. “Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf’s Flush.”
Modern Fiction Studies. 48.3(2002): 614-36.
----- and Michael Whitworth eds, Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and
Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.
-----, ed. “The Three Guineas Letters.” Woolf Studies Annual Vol. 6 (2000): 1168.
-----. Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations. Basingstoke: Macmillan
Press, 2000.
-----, ed. The Years. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Southworth, Helen (ed.), Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the
Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History. Palgrave 2010.
Squier, Susan. Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
Tratner, Michael. Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Whitworth, Michael. Virginia Woolf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Wollaeger, Mark, ‘Woolf, Postcards and the Elision of Race: Colonising Women
in The Voyage Out,’ Modernism/modernity 8.1(2001): 43-75.
Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986.
Useful websites:
International Virginia Woolf Society: http://www.utoronto.ca/IVWS/
Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain: http://www.virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk/