Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism

ISBN-13: 9780814252987 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 208 str.

Jean Mills

Opis

In a work that re-investigates archival materials and deploys an innovative theoretical framework, Jean Mills explores the intellectual and political relationship between Virginia Woolf and the Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison. Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism discovers an intimate connection crucial to Woolfs professional identity and intellectual and artistic development in Harrisons controversial, feminist interpretations of Greek mythology. Mills argues that cross-reading Jane Harrison and Virginia Woolf exposes a distinctive relationship between two women intellectuals, one that does not rehearse the linearity of influence but instead demonstrates the intricacy of intertextuality-an active and transformative use of one body of writing by another writer-that makes of Virginia Woolfs modernism a specifically feminist amplification. This cross-reading reveals a dimension of modernism that has been overlooked or minimized: Mills demonstrates that the questions preoccupying Harrison also resonated with Woolf, who adapted Harrisons ideas to her own intellectual, political, and literary pursuits.To an extent, Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism participates in an act of classical recovery. It is an effort to revive and reclaim Harrisons work and to illustrate the degree to which her cultural, political, and scholastic example informed one of the major modernist voices of the twentieth century.Jean Mills is associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY.