[Vwoolf] new book: Woolf's Ambiguities

Molly Patricia Hite mph7 at cornell.edu
Thu Dec 28 13:50:49 EST 2017


Dear Woolfians,

My book, Woolf’s Ambiguities: Tonal Modernism, Narrative Strategy, Feminist Precursors, is now available from the Cornell University Press.

In this book I compare Woolf’s fiction with that of the late Victorian writers of the feminist polemical novel, especially the novelist, actress, and feminist theorist Elizabeth Robins. I explore the connections between Woolf’s aversion to women’s "pleading a cause” in fiction and her narrative technique of complicating, minimizing, or omitting tonal cues that would signal clearly to readers how to “take” a given passage or character.

Woolf’s manipulation of tone, which I suggest is her greatest formal innovation, rejects overt polemic but also provokes readers to consider and reconsider complicated ethical and political concerns within the novels, which are also some of the main concerns of the twentieth century. We see ambiguities of tone especially in the great middle-period novels, from Jacob’s Room through The Waves, but I also consider The Voyage Out and A Room of One’s Own. I conclude with a consideration of The Pargiters, which in its original, unfinished form experiments with a different and promising treatment of tone.

I have presented pieces of this study as talks at the Woolf conferences, as well as other conferences, and profited enormously from the comments of many, many of the people on this list. I hope this book will open up a number of topics for discussion, from the uses of tonal ambiguity by other modernist and contemporary writers to a reclaiming and revaluing of the polemical feminist novelists.

Thanks—and happy holidays!

Molly


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