Librarian for English
Hyper-Concordance for Virginia Woolf
The Victorian Literary Studies Archive has produced an online Hyper-Concordance of words used in numerous works by many authors, including Virginia Woolf. Select one of her works from the drop down list, then run a search for any word used in the book to find out how many times and where it is used.
Researching Virginia Woolf and her works
The resources on this guide will help you as you undertake research related to Virginia Woolf this semester. This page includes information for finding Woolf-related critical scholarship and biographical information. Use the other tabs in this guide to find resources for researching the reception history and publication history of Woolf's works, as well as guidance on citing works you have used in your research papers and tools for making off-Grounds access to our resources easier.
Finding Woolf-related critical scholarship - Library databases
The MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) indexes the broadest range of resources about literature in all languages. If a literary study of your novel or work exists, you will likely find it here. Not everything in the MLA Bibliography is full-text, meaning that you may only see a description of an article, rather than the text of the article. To get full text of an article, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries”, or look up the journal title in Virgo, the library catalog. If the citation is for a book or an essay/chapter in a book, look for the book title in Virgo.
ProQuest One Literature contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, and dissertations. It also includes more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings.
JSTOR includes older issues of scholarly journals, from their beginnings to 3-5 years ago, so this may be another good database to look for articles related to your novel or work. Articles in JSTOR should be full-text, if we subscribe to the journal.
Project MUSE includes searchable full text of nearly 600 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and more, mostly from North American university presses.
Finding print and ebooks - critical scholarship
Virgo is UVA Library's catalog. Search Virgo for scholarship about Woolf and her works. Use subject headings to help you find resources that meet your research needs. You can use a general subject to get started, like: Woolf, Virginia -- 1882-1941 -- Criticism and interpretation or Woolf, Virginia -- 1882-1941 -- To the lighthouse (substitute titles of other works to look for criticism on those).
You can also run an advanced search and pair a search for Woolf with a search for subjects that relate to themes/topics of interest. For example, you might search for a keyword of Woolf and a subject of: Subconsciousness in literature or Realism in literature or World War (1914-1918).
Once you find a book that includes a subject heading that relates to your topic of interest, click on the subject heading in the item record to find other items marked with that subject.
Below are a few examples of print books and ebooks that critically examine Woolf and her works.
The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781107052086Publication Date: 2015To The Lighthouse is one of the most important of Virginia Woolf's modernist achievements. Written by leading international scholars of Woolf and modernism, this companion will be of interest to students and scholars alike. Individual chapters explore the biographical and textual genesis of the novel; its narrative perspectives and use of form; its thematic and formal attention to time and space; and its representations of feminism and gender as well as generational change, race, and class. Complete with a chapter on the novel's critical history, a chronology, and a guide to further reading, this volume synthesizes To The Lighthouse's major ideas and formal innovations while also summarizing and advancing critical debate.
Virginia Woolf's Unwritten Histories: Conversations with the Nineteenth Century by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9780429331787Publication Date: 2022Virginia Woolf's Unwritten Histories explores the interrelatedness of Woolf's modernism, feminism and her understanding of history as a site of knowledge and a writing practice that enabled her to negotiate her heritage, to find her place among the moderns as a female artist and intellectual, and to elaborate her poetics of the "new": not as radical rupture but as the result of a process of unwriting and rewriting "traditional" historiographical orthodoxies. Its central argument is that unless we comprehend the genealogy of Woolf's historical thought and the complexity of its lineage, we cannot fully grasp the innovative thrust of her attempt to "think back through our mothers." Bringing together canonical texts such as Orlando (1928), A Room of One's Own (1929), Three Guineas (1938) or Between the Acts (1941) and under-researched ones -- among which stand Woolf's essays on historians and reviews of history books and her pieces on literary history and nineteenth-century women's literature -- this book argues that Woolf's textual "conversations" with nineteenth-century writers, historians and critics, many of which remain unexplored, are interwoven with her historiographical poiesis and constitute the groundwork for her alternative histories and literary histories: "unwritten," open-textured, unacademic and polemical counter-narratives that keep track of the past and engage politically with the future.
Virginia Woolf: Music, Sound, Language by Call Number: Clemons PR6045 .O72 Z5783 2019ISBN: 9781487504267Publication Date: 2019Arguing that sound is integral to Virginia Woolf's understanding of literature, Elicia Clements highlights how the sonorous enables Woolf to examine issues of meaning in language and art, elaborate a politics of listening, illuminate rhythmic and performative elements in her fiction, and explore how music itself provides a potential structural model that facilitates the innovation of her method in The Waves . Woolf's investigation of the exchange between literature and music is thoroughly intermedial: her novels disclose the crevices, convergences, and conflicts that arise when one traverses the intersectionality of these two art forms, revealing, in the process, Woolf's robust materialist feminism. This book focuses, therefore, on the conceptual, aesthetic, and political implications of the musico-literary pairing. Correspondingly, Clements uses a methodology that employs theoretical tools from the disciplines of both literary criticism and musicology, as well as several burgeoning and newly established fields including sound, listening, and performance studies. Ultimately, Clements argues that a wide-ranging combination of these two disciplines produces new ways to study not only literary and musical artifacts but also the methods we employ to analyze them.
Virginia Woolf: Twenty-First Century Approaches by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo (also available in print)ISBN: 9780748693931Publication Date: 2015Reconsiders Virginia Woolf's work for the 21st century focusing on coevolution, duality and contradiction. These eleven newly commissioned essays represent the evolution, or coevolution, of Woolf studies in the early twenty-first century. Divided into five parts: Self and Identity; Language and Translation; Culture and Commodification; Human, Animal and Nonhuman; and Genders, Sexualities and Multiplicities, the essays represent the most recent scholarship on the subjective, provisional, and contingent nature of Woolf's work.
Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Vision by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9783110340228Publication Date: 2014The category of vision is significant for Modernist texts as well as for the unfolding discourse of Modernism itself. Within the general Modernist fascination with the artistic and experimental possibilities of vision and perception this study looks at Virginia Woolf's novels and her critical writings and examines the relation between visuality and aesthetics. An aesthetics of vision, as this study argues, becomes a productive principle of narrative. The visual is not only pertinent to Woolf's processes of composition, but her works create a kind of vision that is proper to the text itself - a vision that reflects on the experience of seeing and renegotiates the relation between the reader and the text.
Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy by Call Number: Clemons PR6045 .O72 Z6977 2020ISBN: 9781350022713Publication Date: 2020Revisiting Virginia Woolf's most experimental novels, Elsa Högberg explores how Woolf's writing prompts us to re-examine the meaning of intimacy. In Högberg's readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, intimacy is revealed to inhere not just in close relations with the ones we know and love, but primarily within those unsettling encounters which suspend our comfortable sense of ourselves as separate from others and the world around us. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy locates this radical notion of intimacy at the heart of Woolf's introspective, modernist poetics as well as her ethical and political resistance to violence, aggressive nationalism and fascism.
Wild Outbursts of Freedom: Reading Virginia Woolf's Short Fiction by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9780313323768Publication Date: 2004A pivotal figure in the world of novelists, Virginia Woolf was an outsider as a short story writer. Her stories form a large part of her output, but they were routinely sidelined in favor of her novels, which remain her pre-eminent literary legacy. Bringing together information from unpublished sources, Skrbic provides a long-overdue examination of Woolf's experiments with the short story form. Offering a model for the analysis of Woolf's short fiction, this book gives prominence to the way in which Woolf utilizes the short story's indeterminate frame to question the form, structure, and conventionalities of fiction. Scholars, students, and fans of Woolf will profit from this careful consideration of a neglected area of Woolf scholarship. Despite her popularity as a novelist, Woolf was among the very few writers of her generation to face the creative challenge of writing stories with no direct action, human content, or dialogue. For Woolf, writing short fiction was a displacement activity and the short story's marginal and detached framework lent an ideal shape to her thoughts.
Finding biographical information about Woolf, another author, an illustrator, or publisher
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) provides entries on the lives of British persons from the earliest times to the end of the 20th century. IMPORTANT: our access is limited so please click the Sign Out link at the bottom of the page and close the window when you are finished.
Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. Interacting with these materials creates a dynamic inquiry from any number of perspectives into centuries of women's writing.
Literature Resource Center (LRC) includes the full text of important literary reference works. Among them are articles from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which is a terrific source for finding detailed biographies and profiles of authors, illustrators, publishers, and other literary figures. Run a search for a person's name and then choose the Biographies tab, if there are articles available (though other articles - critical or otherwise -- could be useful, too!)
There are also many book-length works on Woolf and her friends, family, and associates. Find them using a Virgo catalog search. A few examples:
Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf by Call Number: Clemons PR6045.O72 Z7729 1998ISBN: 9780374166595Publication Date: 1998Virginia Woolf once mused that no biographer had ever been "subtle enough and bold enough to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow" that is an artist's life. Mitchell Leaska has now answered this daunting challenge. The editor of two of her novels, a volume of letters, and her early journals, as well as the author of a critical work that Leonard Woolf called "the most illuminating study of Virginia Woolf's novels that I have ever read". Leaska is uniquely placed to write the most uncompromising and deeply informed literary biography to date. Leaska unearths much new and disturbing material that illuminates both Woolf's life and work. He recounts the hard realities of Woolf's early life -- the succession of tragic and untimely deaths, the illnesses, the stretches of madness -- as they emerged, infallibly transformed by Woolf's imagination in her iridescent novels, letters, and diaries.
Leonard Woolf: Bloomsbury Socialist by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo (also available in print)ISBN: 9780198814146Publication Date: 2019Leonard Woolf: Bloomsbury Socialist is an invaluable biography of an extremely important and somewhat neglected figure in British life. Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) was somewhat overshadowed by his wife, Virginia Woolf, and his role in helping her is a part of this study. He was born in London to a father who was a successful barrister but whose early death left the family in some economic difficulty. Although in his youth he abandoned his Judaism, Fred Leventhal and Peter Stansky expertly show that being Jewish was deeply significant in shaping Woolf's ideas as well as the Hellenism he imbibed both as a student at St Paul's and Trinity College Cambridge. While there, as a member of the famous small discussion group, the Apostles--as were his close friends, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes--he became part of what would become some years later the Bloomsbury Group. He then spent seven years as a very successful civil servant in Ceylon, gaining experience that would later enable him to write brilliantly about empire as well as a powerful novel, The Village in the Jungle. Returning to London in 1911, he married Virginia Woolf the next year and in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, which went on to be a successful and significant publishing house. In the course of his long life he became a major figure, as a prolific author of important texts and many shorter pieces on a wide range of subjects, but most importantly on international affairs, notably in the creation of the League of Nations, on a whole range of domestic problems and on the issues of imperialism, particularly in Africa.
Vanessa Bell by Call Number: Fine Arts ND497 .B44 A4 2017ISBN: 9781781300596Publication Date: 2017Published in conjunction with the Spring 2017 Dulwich Picture Gallery's exhibition, Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) - the first major museum exhibit devoted to the work of the modernist painter - this stunning book beautifully showcases her oil paintings, photographs, ceramics, fabrics, decorative screens, and works on paper in a marvelous display of Bell's vibrant and wide-ranging talent. Long overshadowed by the complexity of her family life and romantic entanglements as a member of the famed Bloomsbury Group, this collection reconsiders Bell in the context of her relationship with her famous sister, Virginia Woolf, and as muse and confidant to Roger Fry and Duncan Grant - but ultimately as an intrepid artist, deserving of fresh consideration for her artistic genius in her own right. "Inventing a new language of visual expression," Bell's work as an innovative abstractionist is included here, when she experimented in the form decades before it would first get shown in London, and was among the first abstractionists in Europe at the time. Her ground-breaking feminism emerges in her extensive post-Impressionistic work, with her many female subjects and forms detailed throughout the book. What emerges is a collection of work that shows Bell was as radically innovative in the visual arts as her renowned sister was in the literary arts.
Virginia Woolf and the Women Who Shaped Her World by Call Number: Clemons PR6045 .O72 Z6439 2019ISBN: 9781328683953Publication Date: 2019An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies--of strength, style, and creativity--shaped Woolf's path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf's French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L'Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf's aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf, Her mother, Julia, and sisters Stella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.
