Reading Modernism's Readers

Helen Tyson is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century British Literature at the University of Sussex, where she is also a Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. Helen has published in Textual Practice, Literature Compass, Feminist Modernist Studies, Critical Quarterly, Literary Review and the TLS. She is co-editor of the award-winning collection of essays Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (2021).

• AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: Reading Modernism’s Readers1. Modernism and the Childhood Scene of Reading2. Strange Taboos and Detrimental Diets: Reading Ethel M. Dell3. Reading The Waves, Reading You: Virginia Woolf and the Culture of Redemption4. ‘Monsters within and without,’ or, ‘Forebodings about Fascism’: Marion Milner Reads Virginia WoolfConclusion: Reading Modernism’s Readers Today

Reading Modernism’s Readers [...] uses Woolf to think about the role of literature “in dark times”. [...] Helen Tyson’s point is that when Woolf wrote scenes of reading in the turbulent 1930s, illuminating the absorbed mind, she was imagining her own reader picking up the book and asking: what do we want?