Word: woolf
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Virginia Woolf, like James Joyce, is a key figure for an understanding of the direction that fiction is taking in our age. Like him, she has used her not inconsiderable powers in an attempt to adapt the novel to a changed, and continually changing world. David Daiches' critical essay, the second volume in New Directions' "Makers of Modern Literature," is a fit companion to Harry Levin's "James Joyce," which began the series...
...problem which Daiches poses is a crucial one. How shall a sensitive artist with a rich background in the fairly stable tradition of the nineteenth century write about a society where public values have broken down almost completely, and even personality is in flux? The critic traces Virginia Woolf's attempt at a solution, from her earliest novels, through her boldly experimental short stories, to the great achievements of her middle period, and the less successful attempts of her later years, which were carried off by sheer virtuosity in her command of language. He shows how she introduced the lyric...
...Virginia Woolf achieved the unified sensibility, the fusion of thought and emotion in concentration on a particular instant, but her total product lacks structural unity. Daiches, too, is full of remarkable insights into her work, but his total picture is not as clear as it might be throughout his book. One sentence in the final chapter provides an admirable summing up: "She developed a type of fiction in which sensitive personal reactions to experience can be objectified and patterned in a manner that is both intellectually exciting and aesthetically satisfying...
...stories are all worth reading. Top honors go equally to Curtis Thomas's "Ascent" and Doug Woolf's "The Knifeman." Both are compact, sensitively chiselled pieces of work, relaying on restraint and carefully prepared surprise for their effects. Thomas accomplishes the feat of writing a fantasy in a realistic style. A too conscious attempt at atmosphere occasionally swamps Albert Friedman's "Carnival," while David Hessey's "Launching" sacrifices a powerful theme to occasionally slip-shod treatment. Cecil Schneer makes a heroic attempt to get inside a converted isolationist by reducing him through pain to his Freudian common denominator...
Writing of Virginia Woolf's non-fiction (The Common Reader, A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas), Critic Daiches suggests that she might have made a good political pamphleteer. It seems rather like gelding the lily. Yet Mrs. Woolf is memorable for clarity as well as iridescence. A devoted artist, she was no political revolutionist, but she had her veins of wrath. She wrote: "We may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated in that intellectual freedom of which...