Virginia Woolf and Music [Paperback]

These essays explore music and its relationship to language, aesthetics, and culture in the life and work of the preeminent Modernist writer Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own, and other works). Approaching Woolf from musicology, literary criticism, and gender studies, the collection examines her musical background; music in her fiction and critical writings; and the importance of music in the Bloomsbury milieu and its role within the larger framework of Modernism. Making use of Woolf's diaries, letters, fiction, and the testimony of her contemporaries, these essays illuminate the rich and deeply musical nature of Woolf's works.

Virginia Woolf and Music is a fascinating and important contribution to scholarship about Virginia Woolf, music, and interdisciplinary art.In a letter to Elizabeth Trevelyan . . . Virginia Woolf revealed: 'I always think of my books as music before I write them.' [This book is] providing a valuable counterpoint to studies that develop Woolf's interest in the visual arts at the expense of her engagements with music and performance.10/8/14Involving numerous disciplines from history and biography to cultural and inter-media studies . . . Virginia Woolf and Music requires readers to cope with the span of Western culture from ancient history to the latest neologisms.#48, January 2015

Adriana Varga teaches English and Global and Historical Studies at Butler University, Indianapolis.

Preface / Mih?ly Szegedy-Masz?k
List of Abbreviations
Introduction / Adriana Varga
Part I: Music and Bloomsbury Culture
1. Bloomsbury and Music / Rosemary Lloyd
2. Virginia Woolf and Musical Culture / Mih?y Szegedy-Masz?k
Part II Ut Musica Poesis: Music and the Novel
3. Music, Language, and Moments of Being: From The Voyage Out to Between the Acts / Adriana Varga
4. The Birth of Rachel Vinrace from the Spirit of Music / Jim Stewart
5. The Worst of Music : Listening and Narrative in NilcÅ