"This deeply thoughtful phenomenological study makes a welcome move from
psychology to poetics in its original and illuminating account of Woolf's
imaginative engagement with 'waterscapes'. Ranging over all the forms of Woolf's
writing, Dirschauer contributes significantly to recent ecocritical readings of
Woolf, beautifully mapping a network which encompasses English Romantic
poets and Woolf's contemporaries."
- Mark Hussey, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Pace University, USA
"In Modernist Waterscapes Marlene Dirschauer has captured the complexity,
fullness, wonder, and fluid power of Woolf's writing....This is a profound and
delightfully illuminating study of Woolf's immersion in the literary past as she
creates radically new aesthetic forms that shape human connections with the
vast web of the biosphere and its natural forces. A necessary new book for
anyone interested in Virginia Woolf."
- Louise Westling, Professor Emerita of English and Environmental Studies at
the University of Oregon, USA
This book identifies water as the key element of Virginia Woolf's modernist
poetics. The various forms, movements, and properties of water inspired Woolf's
writing of reality, time, and bodies and offered her an apt medium to reflect on
the possibilities as well as on the exhaustion of her art. As a deeply intertextual
writer, Woolf recognised how profoundly water has shaped human imagination
and the landscape of the literary past. In line with recent ecocritical and
ecofeminist assessments of her works, this book also shows Woolf's attraction to
water as part of an indifferent nature that exists prior to and beyond the symbolic.
Through close analyses that span the whole of Woolf's oeuvre, and that centre on
the metaphorical and the material voices of water in her works, Modernist
Waterscapes offers a fresh perspective on a writing that is as versatile as the
element from which it draws. The monograph addresses students and scholars
working in modernist studies and Woolf studies in particular.
Marlene Dirschauer holds a PhD in Comparative Literature. Currently, she works
as Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests
are English modernism as well as religious writings of the early modern era.
BÜCHER SCHNELL UND PORTOFREI MIT DHL
