Alice Fox
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198129882
- eISBN:
- 9780191671876
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198129882.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This book examines the profound effect, on a major critic and novelist of the twentieth century, of the period of English literature's greatest glory, the Renaissance. Beginning in the ...
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This book examines the profound effect, on a major critic and novelist of the twentieth century, of the period of English literature's greatest glory, the Renaissance. Beginning in the sixteenth century, with the poems and plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and with prose writings such as Hakluyt's Voyages, and continuing through the great lyric poets of the seventeenth century, the Renaissance influenced every aspect of Virginia Woolf's work. All her available writing – letters, diaries, reading notes, drafts of essays, novels, and feminist polemic – are explored in this study of Virginia Woolf's varied reactions to the period, and its impact on her fiction and criticism. Each of the novels, in particular, is shown to integrate some element of Renaissance literature in its language, characterization, and often structure, enriching the fiction.
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This book examines the profound effect, on a major critic and novelist of the twentieth century, of the period of English literature's greatest glory, the Renaissance. Beginning in the sixteenth century, with the poems and plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and with prose writings such as Hakluyt's Voyages, and continuing through the great lyric poets of the seventeenth century, the Renaissance influenced every aspect of Virginia Woolf's work. All her available writing – letters, diaries, reading notes, drafts of essays, novels, and feminist polemic – are explored in this study of Virginia Woolf's varied reactions to the period, and its impact on her fiction and criticism. Each of the novels, in particular, is shown to integrate some element of Renaissance literature in its language, characterization, and often structure, enriching the fiction.