 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Common Reader: Volume 1 for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Book Description
This is Virginia Woolf's first collection of essays, published in 1925. In them, she attempts to see literature from the point of view of the 'common reader' - someone whom she, with Dr Johnson, distinguished from the critic and the scholar. She read, and wrote, as an outsider: a woman set to school in her father's library, denied the educational privileges of her male siblings - and with no fixed view of what constitutes 'English Literature'
Product Description
What she produced is an eccentric and unofficial literary and social history from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, with an excursion to ancient Greece thrown in. she investigates medieval England, tsarist Russia, Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian novelists and modern essayists. When she published this book Woolf's fame as a novelist was already established: now she was hailed as a brilliant interpretative critic. Here, she addresses her 'common reader' in the remarkable prose and with all the imagination and gaiety that are the stamp of her genius. (20021018)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The rescue of Virginia Woolf's critical essays from obscurity by critics in recent years and the recognition that they bear significance equal to that of her novels is a delightful fact. Yet it is quite disappointing that the mention of Woolf's work, let alone the essays in particular, still often meet with general dislike, confessions to little understanding of her meanings and occasional ignorance by the general public; this is compounded by the fact that Woolf's own intention was to reach this type of audience: the alert, interested and not necessarily well-educated reader.
Reading the first volume of The Common Reader could reverse the situation. Known to few yet targeted at the wider public, the lay 'common reader' as its title suggests, this is Virginia Woolf's attempt to produce a collection of essays with an interconnecting, cyclical thematic pattern running throughout in order to connect with the reader and practise a dialogic relationship whereby the author's and the reader's mind merge for the sake of artistic creation.
Embarking on the discussion of a wide range of topics from novelists, dramatists, essayists and letter-writers to issues like the process of reading, the function of criticism and its abuse by authoritarian critics, or women's experiences of patriarchy over the centuries, this is a book designed to enrich the mind and not to bore. Definitely a good read!!
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
