This book principally coheres around a sense of womens writing as inseparable from its cultural production. The multi-faceted essays here reveal how feminist criticism changed in one academics career from 1986 from the publication of her stellar work, Feminist Criticism. Snapshots discusses theories including the anxiety of influence, écriture feminine, postmodernism, life-writing all informed by a belief that subjectivity and creativity are integral to non-fiction writing. At the centre of these discussions is the work of Virginia Woolf, whose reputation and scholarly status are unique. The book maps Humm's writing on feminism, visual culture and twentieth-century womens writing across forty transformative years of criticism.
Readers and scholars will benefit from the books historical and theoretical range, as well as its autobiographical fragments. It demonstrates how feminists try always to be critically innovative, and the ways in which Maggie Humm's work has opened up new avenues into twentieth-century womens writing, film and feminist criticism.
Arvustused
Maggie Humms writing is infused with photographic sensibility, taking us to the borderlands between the visual and the literary. Like Woolf in Orlando, she flashes cinematic contrasts before us, opening our eyes to the significance of the fragmentary. * Nino Strachey, author of Young Bloomsbury and Rooms of Their Own *
Series Editors' Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Snapshots of Memory
Part I. Feminism
1. Feminist Literary Criticism
2. Feminism in the Academy
3. Foregrounding Women Writers: British Women Writers 1900 to the Present
4. Writing across Borders
5. From Essentialism to Intertextuality
Part II. Virginia Woolf
6. Linking Women through Time: Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Maï
Zetterling
7. Photography, Gender and Virginia Woolfs Portraits
8. Postmodernism and Orlando
9. The 1930s, Photography and Virginia Woolfs Flush
10. Woolf and the Visual
Autobiography and a Final Snapshot
Index
Maggie Humm is an Emeritus Professor whose work on Woolf includes Feminism and Film; Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema; Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts and The Bloomsbury Photographs. Her novel Talland House takes Lily Briscoe from To the Lighthouse, telling her life outside Woolfs novel, and Lily solves the mystery of Mrs Ramsays sudden death. Among other prizes, the novel won Womens Fiction International Impact Awards. Radical Woman: Gwen John & Rodin, about the artist Gwen Johns affair with Rodin, was a finalist in the American Writing Awards and won the Bookfest Awards for Womens Historical Fiction.
