Modernist Waterscapes: Water, Imagination and Materiality in the Works of Virginia Woolf [Paperback]

This book identifies water as the key element of Virginia Woolfs modernist poetics. The various forms, movements, and properties of water inspired Woolfs writing of reality, time, and bodies and offered her an apt medium to reflect on the possibilities as well as on the exhaustion of her art. As a deeply intertextual writer, Woolf recognised how profoundly water has shaped human imagination and the landscape of the literary past. In line with recent ecocritical and ecofeminist assessments of her works, this book also shows Woolfs attraction to water as part of an indifferent nature that exists prior to and beyond the symbolic. Through close analyses that span the whole of Woolfs oeuvre, and that centre on the metaphorical and the material voices of water in her works, Modernist Waterscapes offers a fresh perspective on a writing that is as versatile as the element from which it draws. The monograph addresses postgraduate students and scholars working in modernist studies andWoolf studies in particular.

1. Introduction: Virginia Woolfs Modernist Waterscapes.- 2. Aqueous Affinities: Woolf, Bachelard and the English Romantic Poets.- 3. How It Floats Me Afresh: Water in Woolfs Early Experimental Fiction.- 4. The Fluid Texture of Time: To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves.- 5. The Obscure Body of the Sea: Female Bodies, Water and Artistic Creation from The Voyage Out to The Waves.- 6. Floating Down a River into Silence: Water in Woolfs Later Works.- 7. Conclusion. 

The book is remarkably detailed and rigorous in its textual analysis. Dirschauer has clearly read widely in Woolf studies and in Woolfs oeuvre, and this study results in a richly layered and compelling argument ... . The breadth, attention, and density of Dirschauers analyses are impressive. & Modernist Waterscapes offers much of interest to Wools5