Repository | Book | Chapter

This chapter considers the relationship between Woolf s work and the evolving body of criticism concerned with modernism. Her work as a writer and critic has both shaped and been shaped by modernist criticism. As importantly, her work as a publisher helped to form the cultural economy of the literature we now know as modernism. The Hogarth Press was not only a vehicle for putting Woolf 's own work into the public realm, but it was also responsible, for example, for the first major works of Freud in English, and published significant works by key modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein (see Willis 1992). And Woolf herself set the type for the Hogarth edition of Eliot's The Waste Land (1923). "The powerful intellectual developments that made modernism a pan-European phenomenon", as Michael Whitworth observes, "were sustained at a local level by material institutions like the Hogarth Press' (2000, 150). Just as her press transmitted many important modernist texts, without ever using the term modernism, so Woolf's writing has transmitted modernist theories, oblivious of the term (in its present connotations) that now so thoroughly infuses critical reference to her work. Just as her friend the art critic, Roger Fry bestowed the epithet, "Post-Impressionist", on the work of the recently deceased "modern" painters, Van Gogh, Gauguin and others, so Woolf has posthumously received the epithet "modernist", a term extended to many of her contemporaries, some of whom pronounced themselves Imagists, or Vorticists, Futurists, Cubists, Dadaists, and so on, but not Modernists. In the decades since her death, Woolf studies and modernist studies have grown up together (a claim which is also made about Woolf and feminism), though not always in harmony.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230206045_3

Full citation: