Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence - Paperback

by Elsa Högberg (Editor), Amy Bromley (Editor)

Highlights the interconnected styles and contexts of Virginia Woolf's Orlando by examining individual sentences

If the line is the privileged semantic unit in verse, we could ask whether the sentence plays the same role in prose. This possibility holds particular relevance for Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography, which presents an intriguing collage of different sentence styles. The present essay collection of 16 original essays offers fresh perspectives on Orlando through a unique attention to Woolf's sentences. By focusing on single sentences in order to address the book's many interlacing connections between aesthetics and context, it aims to recuperate Orlando as one of Woolf's most dynamic textual experiments. To what extent does Orlando enact a politics of the sentence? How does Woolf's manipulation of generic, gendered, sexual and racial boundaries play out on the level of the sentence? These are some of the questions that this timely volume engages. Contributors include: Jane de Gay, Jane Goldman, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Randi Koppen and Steven Putzel.

Key Features

• Offers fresh close readings of Woolf's Orlando on the level of the sentence, and draws out the sentence as an important textual unit as well as thematic and contextual concept
• Presents the first book-length study of the novel in a readable and engaging format, combining forceful intellect and research with an alertness to the text's unique playfulness
• Covers a wide range of topics including sexuality, gender, materiality, intimacy, nationality, colonialism, religiosity, theatricality and literary intertextuality
• Demonstrates the value for literary studies of a methodological focus on single sentences that combines readings of contextual history, politics, gender, and art with close textual analysis

Front Jacket

'An exceptional collection of essays with a far-ranging textual and pedagogical approach, interweaving poised close readings and vibrant literary theory, cultural materiality and critical praxis. Embracing the heightened reverence of spirituality and the wild bawdiness of puns, the volume unpacks Orlando's embedded erotics, disruptive, syntax, artful ventriloquy and rapturous breathlessness to become "a love letter to all women".' Claire Davidson, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle The first scholarly collection to highlight the dazzling variety of interconnected styles and contexts of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, by examining its key sentences Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography presents an intriguing collage of different sentence styles. This book's 16 original essays, including contributions from Jane de Gay, Jane Goldman, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Randi Koppen and Steven Putzel, offer fresh perspectives on Orlando through a unique attention to Woolf's sentences. Focusing on single sentences in order to address Orlando's many interlacing connections between aesthetics and context, it aims to recuperate this text as one of Woolf's most dynamic experiments. To what extent does Orlando enact a politics of the sentence? How does Woolf's manipulation of generic, gendered, sexual and racial boundaries play out on the level of the sentence? These are some of the questions with which this timely volume engages. Contributors include: Jane de Gay, Jane Goldman, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Randi Koppen and Steven Putzel. Elsa Högberg is a research fellow at Uppsala University. Her research explores literary modernism and the ethics and politics of intimacy, with a particular focus on Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy, forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic. Amy Bromley is an early-career researcher in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on Virginia Woolf's short texts and the aesthetics of the literary sketch, and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Cover image: Virginia Woolf by Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (c) Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017 Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-1460-9 Barcode

Author Biography

Elsa Högberg is Research Fellow at the Department of English, Uppsala University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy (2020) and co-editor, with Amy Bromley, of Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

Amy Bromley is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow specialising in Virginia Woolf's short texts. She has published scholarly reviews and articles in The Journal of the Short Story in English, Virginia Woolf Miscellany and Glasgow Review of Books.