Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere

This 2003 book relates Woolf's literary reviews and essays to early twentieth-century debates about the value of 'highbrow' culture.

Melba Cuddy-Keane (Author)

9780521035385, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 January 2007

248 pages
22.8 x 15.4 x 1.9 cm, 0.377 kg

'Melba Cuddy-Keane's outstanding Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere puts to rest any lingering doubts about the significance of Woolf's criticism by delineating a new context in which to read it … elegantly argued … This is an important book, a smart book, and a well-written book.' Woolf Studies Annual

Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere relates Woolf's literary reviews and essays to early twentieth-century debates about the value of 'highbrow' culture, the methods of instruction in universities and adult education, and the importance of an educated public for the realization of democratic goals. By focusing on Woolf's theories and practice of reading, Melba Cuddy-Keane refutes assumptions about Woolf's modernist elitism, revealing instead a writer who was pedagogically oriented, publicly engaged and committed to the ideal of classless intellectuals working together in reciprocal exchange. Woolf emerges as a stimulating theorist of the unconscious, of dialogic reading, of historicist criticism and of value judgments, while her theoretically informed but accessible prose challenges us to reflect on academic writing today. Combining a wealth of historical detail with a penetrating analysis of Woolf's essays, this 2003 study will alter our views of Woolf, of modernism and of intellectual work.

Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
Introduction: a wider sphere
Part I. Cultural Contexts: 1. Democratic highbrow: Woolf and the classless intellectual
2. Woolf, English studies and the making of the (new) common reader
Part II. Critical Practice: 3. Woolf and the theory and pedagogy of reading
Postscript: intellectual work today
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]