Virginia Woolf and the Writing Self

Makiko Minow-Pinkney's "Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject" (1987) was a pathbreaking investigation of the relations between psychoanalysis, feminism and modernism in Woolf's writings. Two decades later it remains a central reference point in the field, much cited by critics and consistently featuring on student reading lists. This volume of selected essays brings together some central sections of that earlier book, including both its theoretical framework and its striking analysis of Orlando, and essays published since in which Minow-Pinkney extends her Kristevan and Lacanian approach to the question of Woolf's subjectivity and its relationship to her writing. The approach itself is refined in important new theoretical directions, and it is then extended into a variety of exciting new areas such as Walter Benjamin's theory of translation, modernist technology, postmodern theory, Japanese modernism, and the curious contemporary phenomenon of fictional biographies of Virginia Woolf. Woolf's major novels such as "Mrs Dalloway", "To the Lighthouse" and "The Waves" are explored in startling new ways, but less well-known corners of the Woolf canon such as "Evening over Sussex" and "Carlyle's House" are illuminated too. Minow-Pinkney has been one of the major practitioners of a literary theory-oriented approach to Virginia Woolf, and these essays represent the lifetime summation of her distinguished work in the field. Key features: reprints a substantial section from the author's seminal but now unavailable 1987 study of Woolfian subjectivity; refines the author's Kristevan-Lacanian theoretical framework in new directions through such concepts as 'the Thing' (Kristeva), 'the Imaginary father' (Kriteva), 'the Real' (Lacan) and the Freudian problematic of mourning and melancholia; and addresses exciting new areas such as Walter Benjamin's theory of translation, modernist technology, postmodern theory, Japanese modernism, and the contemporary phenomenon of fiction.