Virginia Woolf in Manhattan
- Submitting institution
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Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 1316
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Telegram
- ISBN
- 9781846591884
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- June
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Virginia Woolf in Manhattan is a radical rethink of the biofiction genre, bringing Woolf back to life in 21st-century New York and Istanbul to examine what Bloomsbury modernist values tell us about today’s book industry and social freedoms. The book involved extensive research time from 2008 to 2013, many trips to New York and Istanbul, and collaboration with Turkish academics to understand the role of Woolf’s work in Turkey, where literary and gender freedoms still need arguing. I re-read Woolf’s letters, diaries and novels and much secondary literature and studied Woolf’s manuscripts in the New York Public Library.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Virginia Woolf in Manhattan brings Virginia Woolf back to life in present day New York. A best-selling novelist, Angela Lamb, tries to read Woolf’s manuscripts in the New York Public library – as I did while researching this novel. She finds they are only available on microfilm, and her frustrated longing draws Virginia Woolf, alive but damp, from the stacks. Angela has to chaperone her around Manhattan and finally to Istanbul, where Woolf’s arrival astounds a conference on her work.
A small sub-genre of biofiction, beginning with The Hours (Michael Cunningham, 1998) has re-imagined Woolf in her own time; I wanted my novel to challenge the genre by making its central character a twenty-first-century Woolf who does not, therefore, intrude on the real woman’s intimate acts and consciousness. (I developed these thoughts into the first plenary at Reading University’s 2016 International Conference on Biofiction.) Instead my novel is a radical experiment which asks:-
i) what might Woolf think about today’s literary, social and intellectual freedoms – and what do Bloomsbury modernist values tell us about today’s commercial book industry?
ii) can we rethink Woolf’s suicide and explode the myth that female creativity is self-destructive?
My novel explores a creative method of renewing the efficacy of canonical fiction and creating dialogue between – in this case – a literary sensibility of the High Modernist period and attitudes now.
The novel also compares two great cities, Istanbul and New York. In the Istanbul section, I show how important Woolf’s work still is for Turkish students as a claim to the social, sexual and personal liberty that British and American fans take for granted. It mattered to me that I then read from and discussed my novel at plenary sessions at Istanbul University and the 25th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference in America.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
