Modernism is often connected to the public sphere due to its associations with urbanity and technological changes. But interiority and private life was as important to modernity and, in particular, in Virginia Woolf’s writing. This essay explores the protagonists’ access to and experience of privacy in Woolf’s novels To the Lighthouse (1927) and Mrs Dalloway (1925), which both centre on women in a domestic environment. The reading combines modernist reactions against Victorian domesticity, which was structured on the private/public dichotomy and which limited women’s access to privacy, and combines it with modernist views of interiority, informed, more specifically, by Freud’s model of the unconscious and the spatial features of it. Privacy and interiority are imagined with spatial metaphors, but privacy is not necessarily connected to physical place and being alone, but rather having the ability to control the social situation and to choose what one reveals about oneself. Both novels re-imagine privacy and its ties to physical as well as mental space. This essay argues that To the Lighthouse is centred on a traditional Victorian home which reflects how its protagonist experiences interior privacy, and Mrs Dalloway explores a more modern domesticity that challenges Victorian organisation of the home and in turn, women’s access to privacy and solitude. With modernity public life was made available for women to a larger extent, but just as public life is coded by power relations, so is private life, which determines what sort of life could be lived by, for example, women.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Randy Malamud, committee chair; Meg Harper, Paul Schmidt, committee members. Electronic text (61 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 3, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-61).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1989.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1989. / Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, May 2008.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of English, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

In these novels, Woolf demonstrates the ways in which wartime trauma affects post-war life, from the societal trauma of losing an entire generation in Jacob’s Room, to the continuation of wartime beyond the end of the war for traumatized soldiers and anyone whose lives they touch in Mrs. Dalloway, to recovery through the creation of art and family ties in To the Lighthouse, to the question of futurity inherent in wartime trauma in The Years.

Submitted by Automação e Estatística (sst@bczm.ufrn.br) on 2018-06-15T20:55:26Z No. of bitstreams: 1 CarmenJoaquinaRiveraParra_TESE.pdf: 1211181 bytes, checksum: c8b58614b46d9b7d38293029d6264491 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Arlan Eloi Leite Silva (eloihistoriador@yahoo.com.br) on 2018-06-18T22:31:42Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 CarmenJoaquinaRiveraParra_TESE.pdf: 1211181 bytes, checksum: c8b58614b46d9b7d38293029d6264491 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-06-18T22:31:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 CarmenJoaquinaRiveraParra_TESE.pdf: 1211181 bytes, checksum: c8b58614b46d9b7d38293029d6264491 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-09-29 / A obra de Virginia Woolf pode ser entendida como um pensamento da emancipação que a autora desenvole tanto na sua obra ensaística como na sua obra de ficção. O objetivo principal da tese será a problematização desse conceito de emancipação na sua singularidade como estando ligado a escrita e a leitura. Esse conceito supõe uma revisão das ideias de História e História da Literatura. O fio conductor da emancipação tem como personagem conceptual o anônimo, ou “Anon”. Ele permite conceber os efeitos específicos que a literatura tem sobre as subjetividades, pois apresenta uma possibilidade de existência numa espécie de dupla vida no interior das condições recebidas sejam elas ou não discriminatórias, criando, ao mesmo tempo, uma existência outra. É uma figura mista e ambígua que existe apenas na escrita e que torna-se visível no ato de leitura. Pretendemos problematizar a questão política da emancipação das mulheres pela literatura, entendidas como “anônimas” pelo anteriormente exposto, no seio da crítica à história literária que Woolf levanta nos seus ensaios lendo a história da literatura universal a partir da figura dos anônimos leitores e escritores. / The work of Virginia Woolf can be understood as an emancipatory thinking she developed both as an essayist and as a writer of fiction. The main purpose of this dissertation is to problematize that very notion of emancipation as singularly linked to writing and reading. Such a concept of emancipation entails a reconsideration of the ideas of History and History of Literature. The unifying thread of the notion of emancipation would be the conceptual literary character of the anonymous, or “Anon”. That character allows to conceive the specific effects that literature has over subjectivities, since it represents the possibility of existing in a short of double life while living in a context of given conditions that might be discriminatory or not, creating at the same time an alternative existence. It constitutes a mixed an ambiguous figure only possible through writing, one which becomes visible during the act of reading. In this dissertation, we aim at problematizing the political problem of the emancipation of women in literature -women understood here as “anonymous” in the sense described before- contextualizing it in the critique of the history of universal literature that Woolf provides in her essays, mainly through the figure of anonymous writers and readers.

The aim of this essay is to analyze how food and meals produce and reproduce values and power relations and how these processes are portrayed in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Using sociological writings in the field of food consumption and production I study the structures that affect our relation to food and eating. This perspective is combined with a phenomenological view, aiming to examine how food is perceived, which is also inspired by queer theories. Using the method of close reading, the theories are applied to Woolf’s work. Themes studied are, for instance, “Food as art” and “Food and war” and how these issues are related to the production of values. It can be concluded that the meals described in To the Lighthouse are closely connected to the (re)production of heteronormative upper middleclass and English, national and patriarchal values – but also that the characters described by Woolf rebel against these values; Woolf’s description of the characters and their actions allows them to both reconstruct and deconstruct values and relations of power.

Virginia Woolf is perhaps best known for her explorations and depictions of human consciousness. However, more contemporary science reveals that consciousness is only a small part of what constitutes our brain function. Rather, there are a dual functions within the human brain: consciousness and cognition. This nonconscious cognition is what allows us to see patterns, to make judgements, and to act reflexively, while consciousness is the function that shapes our individual identity and the story we tell about ourselves. Though previous studies have focused primarily on Woolf's representations of consciousness in her short stories and novels, there is much left to be explored when we look at her works through the lens of nonconscious cognitions, or as Woolf might call them, "moments of non-being" (Sketch 70). In my reading of The Waves, I leverage cognitive theory and new materialism to demonstrate how Woolf creates a world in which humankind--and therefore consciousness--is not entirely absent, but radically decentered. What remains is a world that is purely nonconscious cognition: still full of life and movement, but resistant to the individual identity and narrative structure so deeply sought after by humans. This cognitive project becomes especially apparent in the juxtaposition to the human characters' consciousness-driven narratives about their individual views of the world. I suggest that in the italicized interludes interspersed throughout The Waves, Woolf is writing moments of non-being, what Bernard calls the "world seen without a self"--a world in which human life is only marginal, leaving a quiet scenery full of microscopic action that often remains unseen in the self-focused, stream-of-consciousness narration of the chapters (Waves 287). I argue that by marginalizing humankind and shedding consciousness in the interludes of The Waves, Woolf places humans on the same ontological plane as the rest of the world. In this process, the scenes lose individual identity and traditional narrative, but reveal a connection with lively materials outside of the human self and with the rhythmic circularity of the universe.