...BIOGRAPHY Virginia Woolf, an English author, feminist, essayist and critic, was born on January 25th, 1882 to Sir Leslie Stephen, the editor of Dictionary of National Biography, and Madam Julia Prinsep Stephen, a nurse who published a book on nursing. Virginia’s maiden name was Adeline Virginia Woolf. She grew up in an atmosphere conducive to her future career as a writer since her father, Leslie Stephen, was a respected and well-known intellectual and writer. Although she was not sent to a university as her brothers, she was able to educate herself thoroughly by delving into the volumes of her father's vast library. Woolf grew up during a period of intense feminist activity in London and was an active member of various women's organizations. By the time she came into her own as a writer, significant advances had been made in women's rights. By 1918, a limited franchise had been granted to women in England. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her mother’s sudden death in 1885 and that of Stella, her sister whom she looked up to as a mother were the catalysts for Virginia’s mental breakdown. Modern scholars have suggested that her mental breakdown and subsequent recurring depression were as a result of the sexual abuse which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected to by their half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a journalist, in 1912 and they collaborated...
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...Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen, in 1882. She suffered immensely as a child from a series of emotional shocks (these are included in the biography of Virginia Woolf). However, she overcame these incredible personal damages and became a major British novelist, essayist and critic. Woolf also belonged to an elite group that included Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. Woolf pioneered in incorporating feminism in her writings. “Virginia Woolf’s journalistic and polemical writings show that she made a significant contribution to the development of feminist thought” (Dalsimer). Despite her tumultuous childhood, she was an original thinker and a revolutionary writer, specifically the way she described depth of characters in her novels. Her novels are distinctively modern and express characters in a way no other writer had done before. One reason it is easy to acknowledge the importance of Virginia Woolf is because she wrote prolifically. Along with many novels, she wrote essays, critiques and many volumes of her personal journals have been published. She is one of the most extraordinary and influential female writers throughout history. Virginia Woolf is an influential author because of her unique style, incorporations of symbolism and use of similes and metaphors in her literature, specifically in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Virginia Woolf’s eccentric style is what causes her writings to be distinct from...
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...A Room Of One’s Own It has been eighty-three years since Virginia Woolf spoke at Newnham and Girton on the subject of women and fiction A Room of One’s Own, and though the context seems at times irrelevant to the world in which we live today, we must remember our roots in society. In reading the essay, A Room of One’s Own, we are able to better understand the turmoil and frustration of the female artist of the early twentieth century. Woolf’s writing is meant to be understood by all women, in A Room of One’s own the narrator says, “Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or any other name you please—it is not a matter of importance”(Woolf 5). This quote is an example of Woolf’s attempt to universalize the words in the essay so that they could potentially apply to every woman who read them. I thoroughly enjoyed Ms. Woolf’s use of the English language as an art from, and I believe this style was key to the essay’s success, and one of the reasons A Room of One’s Own is still in print today. Among other reasons we can still understand and find relevance in A Room of Ones Own, is the groundbreaking ideas in the essay. In her own way Virginia Woolf took on the establishment, and tried to give a voice to those who had none. In correspondence between Woolf and her friend G. Lowes Dickinson, she writes that her goal for this essay is to "encourage the young women--they seem to get fearfully depressed." (Woolf xiv) Throughout A Room of One’s Own, a few major ideas really were...
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...two Modern writers depiction of urban life ‘Why do I dramatise London so perpetually’ Woolf wondered in the final months of her life. This essay will seek to examine Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Eliot’s The Waste Land to observe their perpetual fascination with expressing metropolis as a vision of modernity. It will attempt to scrutinize the overwhelming nature of urban life, urban life’s effect on humanity, metropolis being the forefront of society, and also the depiction of a single urban consciousness. Through examining these depictions of urban life, this essay aims to observe the effects rapid urbanisation had on the modern movement and its respective authors. Woolf presents Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness as a vessel to voice the overwhelming nature of urban life and the problem of anxiety experienced in modern metropolis. Immediately in the first paragraph Clarissa’s anxieties are voiced as she embarks to the city to prepare for her party. Clarissa’s consciousness jumps to her memory of a ‘girl of eighteen’ and the solemn and ‘feeling that something awful was about to happen’. The contrast to her feeling of excitement to a feeling of anxiety is stark. The protagonist begins by exclaiming ‘how fresh how calm’ and then to experiencing feeling threatened as her attention reverts from the natural to the ‘uproar of the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans… she loved; life; London’. Woolf plunges the reader into Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness, where the protagonist experiences...
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...her own journey inward in Virginia Woolf’s 1915 novel The Voyage Out. Rachel Vinrace is traveling far away from her home in London. Her fellow passengers are a fascinating and motley assortment of members of Edwardian society whose lives and relationships reveal much about the world from which they come. Through witty comedy and stark tragedy, Woolf examines such themes as family, culture, and the individual in this remarkable portrait of modern life. Its unique and lyrical style, which has garnered the novel praise since its first publication, adds an artistic dimension to this surprisingly current novel. Indeed,The Voyage Out is a beautiful and telling work about self and society that rings as true today as in 1915. 1919, Night and Day [pic] [pic] Originally published in 1919, Night and Day contrasts the daily lives of four major characters while examining the relationships between love, marriage, happiness, and success. Like Virginia Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out, Night and Day is a more traditional narrative than her later novels. Unlike her first novel, however, Night and Day relies much more on its characters' internal struggles to push the its plot forward. What results is a character study of a very quiet group of people who are actually in the throes of deep anxiety and indecision. 1922, Jacob’s Room [pic] Who is Jacob Flanders? In Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel, Jacob’s...
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...Virginia’s London Complex in Mrs. Dalloway Fang Yuling Introduction Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), an experimental novelist, critic and essayist of the 20th century, has been regarded as a major modernist writer, whose great contribution to the innovative techniques is undeniable. Susan squire once said: “Whether she thought it "the most beautiful place on the face of the earth" or "the very devil," to Virginia Woolf the city of London was the focus for an intense, often ambivalent, lifelong scrutiny.” (488) Ever since Woolf was born in London in 1882, not only did she make her home there for nearly all of her fifty-nine years-first in the narrow streets of Kensington and then in the spacious square of Bloomsbury-but she found it a powerfully evocative figure in the literary tradition within which she wrote. In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, we can clearly see that Woolf elaborately arranges Clarissa Dalloway’s one-day life in the City of London. By a simple description of Mrs. Dalloway’s buying flower for an evening party, the reader has been actually taken around London, a city etched in Woolf’s memory. Woolf makes repeated mention of the landmarks or detailed street names in the City of London such as Oxford Street, Bond Street, the Regent’s Park, St. James Street, the Abbey, and the Big Ben, which are all quite familiar to readers. This article is attempting to, under the guidance of the cultural symbol of London itself and several major landmarks in the novel, figure out Woolf's...
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...Rhetorical Strategies: How They Enhance the Essay Today, rhetorical strategies are ubiquitous. They can be discovered in the latest top box office cinematic movie, the beloved binge-watched television show on Netflix, the aggravating commercials we are forced to sit through, the latest best-selling book, etc. Applying rhetorical strategies helps the writer communicate with ease and fluidity. Rhetoric additionally helps the reader or viewer gain interest while making it pleasurable. All in all, rhetorical strategies are simply ways of effectively and adequately presenting material. In the essays of discussion the effectiveness of how imagery, emotional appeal and tone build the writers credibility and enhance the essay will be discovered. For example, Virginia Woolf uses rhetorical strategies in “The Death of The Moth”. Woolf begins by using imagery effectively throughout her essay by strategically incorporating descriptive details. Woolf encountered this moth in the day time, so she begins her essay by stating, “moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths . . .” (para. 1). This statement spikes wonder; what does that mean? She explains that moths in the day “ . . . do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us” (Woolf para. 1). Her sense of imagery is full of color and expression which helps her credibility in her writing. It truly makes...
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...As mortals with limited time on this Earth, humans are faced with the inescapable and inevitable subject of death. In the essay “The Death of a Moth”, by Virginia Woolf, the author depicts the struggle of life and death as an impossible battle to win. Woolf utilizes rhetorical devices such as tone, diction, structure, and imagery to convey this message and invoke the feeling of pity and despair in her reader. As the tone shifts throughout the piece, Woolf’s stylistic choices strengthen her tone and further support her philosophy that death cannot be beat. Woolf maintains a desperate and hopeless underlying tone throughout the literary piece and further develops it in relation to the surface tone of subtle indifference and fascination. Both...
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...Every written work has inscribed meaning and purpose intended by its author, but it is a person’s personal perspective as to which elements of the text provide that meaning. Because reading is a reflection of the reader, one person’s summary or analysis cannot reflect the full importance of a certain passage. In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf explores the dichotomy between men and women to conclude her purpose that a woman needs an income and her own space in order to create things in the same way that a man is able to. In such, there are numerous examples of where Woolf employs techniques such as similes, metaphors, and the way in which these relate to one another in order to have the reader come to this conclusion. However, an overarching and general summary of this work does not...
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...Tin pileus (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). She win the Academy Award for top Actress for BUtterfield 8 (1960), played the mamillale role in Cleopatra (1963), and married her co-star Richard Burton. They appeared together in 11 films, including Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), for which Taylor won a second Academy Award. From the mid-1970s, she appeared less frequently in film, and made occasional appearances in television and theatre. bestessaycheap.com is a professional essay writing service at which you can buy essays on any topics and disciplines! All custom essays are written by professional writers! Her much furrow personal life included eight marriages and several heavy(a) illnesses. From the mid-1980s, Taylor championed HIV and AIDS programs; she co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS interrogative in 1985, and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1993. She received the presidential Citizens Medal, the Legion of Honour, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and a attitude Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, who named her seventh on their list of the Greatest American Screen Legends. Taylor died of congestive tit failur e at the age of 79.If you want to get a full! essay, order it on our...
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...The Representation of Gender in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex by Marte Rognstad A Thesis Presented to The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages University of Oslo In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the MA Degree Spring Term 2012 Marte Rognstad The Representation of Gender in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex Marte Rognstad http://www.duo.uio.no Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo Abstract This thesis presents an exploration of the representation of gender in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex mainly in light of the theories of Judith Butler. The focus will be on how the two novels challenge the traditional concept of gender and gender categories, and in what ways the novels can give us new perspectives on the concept of gender. The theoretical focus will be on Judith Butler, more precisely her idea of gender as performance, and her deconstructionist approach to identity categories. I will present Butler’s proposal for a “new feminist genealogy,” and through my investigation of the representation of gender in Orlando and Middlesex I will show how both novels take on a “Butlerian” understanding of the concept of gender. By looking at various issues related to gender explored in the two novels, and pointing to similarities and differences between the two works, I hope to show how the protagonists, Orlando and Cal/lie, break down and transcend the fraught...
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...TEXTUAL ANALYSIS 1. The passage is taken from Volume II, chapter xx of the novel Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. The bildungsroman begins to focus on the turning point in Jane’s maturity. She will have to make moral decisions and the passage relates her inner forebodings. The novel cannot be truly characterized as gothic however; this chapter appears to have a very gothic tone. This can be seen in the ghostly vision and weather which exhibit supernatural tones, the damaged chestnut tree, and Jane’s restlessness for no apparent reason which she describes as “hypochondriac”. Other gothic elements include Jane’s sense of terror at seeing a vision, wearing and ultimately ruining her wedding veil, the weather, and the symbolic imagery of the Chestnut tree. The passage also represents a significant issue in regards to the morale personae of Mr. Rochester. His untruth at leading Jane to the door of marriage knowing he had an insane wife, whom he could not divorce. One may suppose he should not have offered marriage to Jane. Jane would have to make a moral decision in spite of her deep love for Mr. Rochester and make choices which will affect her life from this time forward on societal and inner morality. TEXTUAL ANALYSIS 2. The passage is taken from the novel Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot, page 68. The passage refers to the narrator speaking of Mr. Riley a “gentleman” who was a very educated auctioneer and appraiser. The passage can be analyzed on different perspectives:...
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...For other uses, see Essay (disambiguation). Essays of Michel de Montaigne Essays are generally short pieces of writing written from an author's personal point of view, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of an article, a pamphlet and a short story. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population are counterexamples. In some countries (e.g., the United States and Canada), essays have become a major part of formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and admission essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants and, in the humanities and social sciences, as a way of assessing the performance of students during final exams. The concept of an "essay" has been extended to other mediums beyond writing. A film essay is a movie that often incorporates documentary film making styles and which focuses more on the evolution of a theme or an idea. A photographic essay is an attempt to cover a topic with a linked series of photographs;...
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...Essays are generally scholarly pieces of writing written from an author's personal point of view, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of an article, a pamphlet and a short story. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population are counterexamples. In some countries (e.g., the United States and Canada), essays have become a major part of formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and admission essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants and, in the humanities and social sciences, as a way of assessing the performance of students during final exams. The concept of an "essay" has been extended to other mediums beyond writing. A film essay is a movie that often incorporates documentary film making styles and which focuses more on the evolution of a theme or an idea. A photographic essay is an attempt to cover a topic with a linked series of photographs; it may or may not have an accompanying text or captions. Contents...
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...The United States criminal justice system, an outwardly fair organization of integrity and justice, is a perfect example of a seemingly equal situation, which turns out to be anything but for women. The policies imposed in the criminal justice system affect men and women in extremely dissimilar manners. I plan to examine how gender intersects with the understanding of crime and the criminal justice system. Gender plays a significant role in understanding who commits what types of crimes, why they do so, who is most often victimized, and how the criminal justice system responds to these victims and offenders. In order to understand the current state of women and the way in which gender relates to crime and criminal justice, it is first necessary to provide a comprehensive analysis of the historical evolution of women in the criminal justice system and the affect that the different waves of feminism have had on policies and practices towards women in this system. I plan to argue that the criminal justice system is another form of patriarchal control, a sexist organization which creates conflict between the private sphere of a woman's life and the public. This control extends far beyond the just incarcerated women, it affects all women. Despite the fact that there have been changes to certain policies and prison regulations, though made with resistance, none of the changes have been for the better. By looking at past and present situations as well as the differing feminist perspectives...
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