M. Latham. Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives. The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama
Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives
The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama
Monica Latham
ISBN 9780367550707
Routledge
262 Pages
£120.00
PRESENTATION
This book explores Virginia Woolf’s afterlives in contemporary biographical novels and drama. It offers an extensive analysis of a wide array of literary productions in which Virginia Woolf appears as a fictional character or a dramatis persona. It examines how Woolf’s physical and psychological features, as well as the values she stood for, are magnified, reinforced or distorted to serve the authors’ specific agendas. Beyond general theoretical issues about this flourishing genre, this study raises specific questions about the literary and cultural relevance of Woolf’s fictional representations. These contemporary narratives inform us about Woolf’s iconicity, but they also mirror our current literary, cultural and political concerns. Based on a close examination of twenty-five works published between 1972 and 2019, the book surveys various portraits of Woolf as a feminist, pacifist, troubled genius, gifted innovative writer, treacherous, competitive sister and tragic, suicidal character, or, on the contrary, as a caricatural comic spirit, inspirational figure and perspicacious amateur sleuth. By resurrecting Virginia Woolf in contemporary biofiction, whether to enhance or debunk stereotypes about the historical figure, the authors studied here contribute to her continuous reinvention. Their diverse fictional portraits constitute a way to reinforce Woolf’s literary status, re-evaluate her work, rejuvenate critical interpretations and augment her cultural capital in the twenty-first century
Table of Contents:
Introduction: ‘I Have Been Dead and Yet Am Now Alive Again’: Catching the Phantom
Biography, fiction and biofiction: from ‘bastard’ to ‘hybrid’
Visions and designs
Postmodernist truthful (mis)representations
From truthful fictions to travesties of truth
Goals and perspectives
Chapter I: Bioplay(giarism)s
The ‘little cut-and-paste job’
‘The play’s the thing’
Virginia’s feminist companions
The last song of the nightingale
Virginia and Vita: a year in love
Chapter II: Detecting Woolf
In the shadow of WWI: Virginia as a feminist sleuth
Who killed Virginia Woolf? The Cambridge Five!
Chapter III: Virginia’s Daughters
Virginia’s long shadow
Virginia’s biological progeny
Chapter IV: Vanessa and Virginia
A tale of two sisters
Vanessa and her sister: ‘twinned always’
Vanessa and Virginia: ‘psychically Siamese’
Vanessa and Virginia: a biofictional spin-off
Chapter V: Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms
Riding the ‘Dark Mare’ at ‘sixty’s gate’
Adeline and Virginia
Mandril and the marmoset
Chapter VI: Biofictive Mirrors: Clarissa Woolf / Virginia Dalloway
A cameo appearance
Mrs Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Brown: death, birth and survival
Chapter VII: Bloomsberries Reimagined
Lytton and Virginia
Variable geometries: squares, circles and triangles
Bloomsbury legacies
Conclusion: Posthumous Lives: ‘I Am Made and Remade Continually’
Biographical Woolfs and fictional Virginias
A summing up of Woolf’s afterlives
Biofiction as critical interpretation
Virginia Woolf legend: keeping the myth alive