Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime

Daniel T. O Hara, Professor of English and Inaugural Mellon Term Professor of Humanities at Temple University, USA.

• 1. Like Giving Birth to a Dead White Star: An Introduction To the Modern Sublime in Virginia Woolf 2. Burning Through Every Context: On Narrating The Modern Sublime in Jacob's Room 3. The Uncanny Muse of Creative Reading: On The New Cambridge Edition of Mrs. Dalloway 4. The Modern Sublime in To the Lighthouse 5. The Revisionary Muse in On Being Ill: Literary Politics, Modernist-Style 6. 'Unborn Selves' in The Waves 7. The Self-Revising Muse: On the Spirit of The Unborn Creator in A Room of One's Own 8. Coda: 'Images of Voice' and the Art of the Sublime

"One of the century's great writers, Virginia Woolf was also one of its greatest readers. In Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal, Daniel O'Hara demonstrates how Woolf's sensitive readings shape the exquisite character and sublime power of her own prose, which frequently combines the specific detail of modern experience with a grandeur associated with an earlier epoch. O'Hara's grounding in romanticism informs his revisionary interpretation of Woolf's modernism. As a result, O'Hara's study produces an aesthetically and historically rich understanding of not just Woolf's own corpus but also of the power of literature to shape ourselves and the worlds we inhabit."Robert T. Tally Jr., Associate Professor of English, Texas State University, USA