A day’s time: the one-day novel and the temporality of the everyday

This essay presents an investigation of the one-day-ness of the one-day novel—to ask what the effects of this temporal frame, in literary form, might be. I approach this question largely through the developing critical field of everyday life studies, in particular on literature and the everyday. There is a surprising paucity of literary criticism focused specifically on the narrative of the single day, and in this essay I launch further discussions of the form, particularly insofar as instances of the one-day novel can also (paradoxically) be read as novels of the everyday. In particular, I argue the one-day novel offers a model for a narrative that operates at a graspably human scale, having a particular capacity to reveal, attend to, and explore the apparently nonproductive or passive elements of everyday life; and that the form also interrogates on the capacity (or otherwise) for individuals to assert agency therein. Finally, I explore the paradoxical future orientation of the apparently bounded and closed single-day narrative structure

Editing Woolf

No abstract available

Editing Woolf

No abstract available

Prophetic Reading: Sisterhood and Psychoanalysis in H.D.’s HERmione

This article offers a comparative reading of H.D.’s 1927 kunstlerroman à clef, HERmione, and Freud’s Dora alongside an intertextual close reading of its dense web of literary allusions in order to argue that it offers a sustained critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and an alternative origin story for the condition of hysteria. Drawing on the notion of prophecy as it is thematised in the novel, the article demonstrates H.D.’s prefiguring of Juliet Mitchell’s recent reconfiguration of hysteria as a response to, replacement by, or failure of identification with a sibling

‘[T]hey would have been the first to correct that sentence’: correcting Virginia Woolf’s short fiction

No abstract available

The day of Orlando

In this chapter, Bryony Randall addresses ideas of temporality, writing and delivery, in which ‘the present moment’ is revealed at the end of the book to be its publication date, ‘Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight’. Showing how the concept of the day is as important to Orlando as its excursion through a time-span of 400 years, Randall draws on recent theories of narrative temporality, dailiness and the novel to make a compelling case for Orlando’s ‘final resolution into a concentrated, extended description of a single day as a key part of the text’s undoing of traditional history’

New Modernist Editing: Ode written partly in prose on seeing the name of Cutbush above a butcher's shop in Pentonville

Virginia Woolf’s ‘Ode written partly in prose on seeing the name of cutbush above a butcher’s shop in Pentonville’ was never published in her lifetime. The only version we have of the text is the typescript, with emendations in Virginia Woolf’s hand (some in pencil and some in black ink), images of which are displayed in this digital edition. The typescript is held in the Monks House Papers of the University of Sussex, reference number SxMs-18/2/B/B.9/F. Unusually, we know the precise date of some of these revisions as Woolf wrote 'October 28th 1934' in black ink in the top left hand corner of the first page of the typescript. To date is has been published only once, in Susan Dick’s The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1985; rev. edn. 1989). There is little in Woolf’s diaries or letters to provide any information about the circumstances of the composition of this text. She had finished the first full draft of the novel that was to be published in 1937 as The Years on 30th September 1934, and was feeling the exhaustion and, to some extent, depression that often accompanied the completion of a large work. The only hints at what might have prompted her to write this piece are two allusions from around the same time, one in her diary and one in a latter, to the pleasure she got from walking around London and imagining the lives of those she sees and overhears – a pleasure that sustained her through much of her life. This digital edition emerged from the work of the AHRC funded New Modernist Editing Network. The Network was established to bring together academics, publishers and book artists concerned with the issues arising from the editing of modernist texts – broadly speaking, experimental works from the early twentieth century. All the major modernist editions currently underway are represented by its membership – an unprecedented coming together of key editors in the field. But the involvement of those from outwith academia, and with various levels and types of editorial experience, was also crucial to achieving the Network’s aims. The approach to producing the digital edition of Woolf’s ‘Ode’ was discussed and workshopped at two of the three meetings of the Network, in February and April 2017. This digital edition is, then, a collaborative effort which draws on the discussions, debates and insights enabled by the Network. The desire was to produce a text which was dynamic and which could allow the user to see the effects of the many choices that an editor has to make in deciding how to approach an edition of a text. In particular, digital technologies permitted us to resist deciding on a ‘final’ text, and instead leave the reader to play with the level of editorial intervention visible on the screen

‘It’s rather distinguished to be as ordinary as I am.’ Woolf’s working women writers

No abstract available

‘Angles and surfaces declared themselves intimately’: intimate things in Dorothy Richardson’s The Trap

Modernist Intimacies traces modern intimacy back to the first decades of the twentieth century, showing that modernism played a crucial role in its emergence. Intimacy can no longer be seen as an exclusively private, familiar sphere of life independent of socio-political realities, and the twelve newly commissioned chapters present incisive, original perspectives on intimacy as a vital dimension of modernist aesthetic and social practices. They engage topics from music-making, wartime radio broadcasting and transnational relations to diary-writing, sexual pleasure, queer religiosity and same-sex love. In attending to a wide range of print literary texts as well as other media such as church murals and sonic archives, the book also points to the resonance of modernist intimacies in our own time