Virginia Woolf and the Great War

by LEVENBACK KAREN L.

• ISBN13: 9780815605461
• ISBN10: 0815605463
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-04-01
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr

Summary

Virginia Woolf was a civilian, a noncombatant during the Great War. Unlike the war poet Wilfred Owen, she had not seen "God through mud. Yet, although she was remembered by her husband as "the least political animal ... since Aristotle invented the definition", and called "an instinctive pacifist" by Alex Zwerdling, her experience and memory of the war became a touchstone against which life itself was measured. Virginia Woolf and the Great War focuses on Woolf's war consciousness and how her sensitivity to representations of war in the popular press and authorized histories affected both the development of characters in her fiction and her nonfictional and personal writings. As the seamless history of the prewar world had been replaced by the realities of modern war, Woolf herself understood there was no immunity from its ravages, even for civilians. Karen L. Levenback's readings of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Years, in particular -- together with her understanding of civilian immunity, the operation of memory in the postwar period, and lexical resistance to accurate representations of war -- are profoundly convincing in securing Woolf's position as a war novelist and thinker whose insights and writings anticipate our most current progressive theories on war's social effects and continuing presence

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Abbreviations	xv
Introduction	I
Myths of War, Illusions of Immunity, Realities of Survival	9	(35)
Life and Death, Memory and Denial in Postwar London	44	(39)
The Language of Memory as Time Passes	83	(31)
Remembering the War in the Years Between the Wars	114	(40)
Epilogue	154	(7)
Appendix/Selected Biographical Notes	161	(16)
Works Cited	177	(20)
Index	197