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A Voice in the Archives: In Search of Woolf's Lost Tape
- from In the Archives
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- By Alice Staveley, Stanford University
- Edited by Nicola Wilson, Claire Battershill
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- Book:
- Virginia Woolf and the World of Books
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 16 January 2020
- Print publication:
- 27 September 2018, pp 20-25
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Summary
I want to begin this paper unconventionally, and to offer first my inspiration for writing it. If you'll forgive me, I'm going to be musing, while, I hope, telling you a rollicking good story, about a topic deserving of more exacting attention: archives, what they are, and why we're in them. I particularly want to think about why as feminist critics and historians of women's lives, we need to be in them more, and not alone: we need others—the living alongside the dead—at a crucial moment in our political history when the forces of cultural amnesia about the power of collective, and crucially, intergenerational feminisms, is, I fear, on the rise.
Amnesia, loss, gatekeepers, tangerine tinted trash-can fires as leaders of the free world (thank you, Samantha Bee) are all real and existential threats to progressive cultural memory. Searching for origins in the archives may, pace Derrida, be an exercise in infinite regress, but there is also joy and the rock-solid hope of connection that should drive us there, as academics, as humanists, and as teachers leading the new generation. Ted Bishop has described the jouissance of archival pursuit in terms that resonate with my ruminations today and connect with discussions begun at the MSA last November on Jane Garrity's panel “What Are We Doing When We Are in the Archives?”: “Part of the reason we work in archives is, I'm convinced, for the archival jolt, a portal to knowledge and, in itself, an assurance that we have connected with something real.”
For feminists, there are still many voices to be found, still more wily reckonings of self and other, to be unearthed in archives. What I'm going to recount here—essentially the story of my search for a cassette tape that promised a lost recording of Woolf 's voice—touches on all of those things, most particularly that self and other piece: that is, the often-uncanny ways in which what begins as a purely “academic” pursuit, can turn tail, surprising us with apparently unsought revelations. Archival work can make us feel that, far from being well-trained detectives in pursuit of that lost archival gem, the journey itself, for which the archive is the road, is pursuing us, telling truths about our collective lives as scholar-adventurers that propel us forward even in the murkiest of times.
9 - Bibliographic Parturition in Orlando: Books, Babies, Freedom and Fame
- Edited by Elsa Högberg, Uppsala University, Amy Bromley, University of Glasgow
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- Book:
- Sentencing Orlando
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 06 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 09 January 2018, pp 116-127
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Summary
So here then we are at Kew, and I will show you to-day (the second of March) under the plum tree, a grape hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in October; flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be said, and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be flinging a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, waiting the kingfisher, which, it is said, was seen once to cross in the evening from bank to bank.
Situated in the culminating pages of Orlando, this sentence, bursting with biographical evasion, coy euphemism, faux calm and literal legerdemain depicts the risky, high-stakes ventures of women who labour. The biographer's hand, like a doctor screening a woman's erogenous and procreative zone, conjures the cloak to obscure from view the birth of Orlando's son. Distraction is privileged over attraction. ‘Look! Look!’ the narrator-biographer seems to urge the reader; take in the view of Kew – ‘Kew will do’ – at whose entry gates two lions, we learn just before this sentence, stand ‘couchant’ (O 215) as if to avert attention from the crowning head. Topographical entrances (the gates of Kew) and morphological exits (the birth canal) exchange furtive glances just before the cloak is, gauntlet-like, flung under the oak tree in flamboyant obscurantism. The rhyming play (kew/do; cloak/oak) conjures delay and delight; it soothes and lulls like a nursery rhyme while the kingfisher's flickage from ‘bank to bank’ rhythms uterine pulsations. Yet, on a deeper, more chthonic level, the playful language engages with what Gillian Beer calls the ‘anarchic neatness of rhyme [that] pins together the unlike’: in this instance, the uneasy, metaphorically commonplace, but, for the woman writer, paradoxical pairing of book and baby. Orlando's poem, ‘The Oak Tree’, and her son here have simultaneous, analogous births. The controlled anarchy of their doubling interrogates the tensile interrelationships between life and art for a transhistorical, transgendered woman who dares to joyously have it all.
The Hogarth Press, Digital Humanities, and Collaboration: Introducing the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP)
- from Woolf Beyond the Book
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- By Nicola Wilson, University of Reading, Elizabeth Willson Gordon, King's University, Alice Staveley, Stanford University, Helen Southworth, University of Oregon, Claire Battershill, University of Reading
- Edited by Helen Wussow, Mary Ann Gillies
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- Book:
- Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2014, pp 223-231
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Summary
Origins
The impetus for this international, digital project on the history of modernist publishing arose from each collaborator's confrontation with research barriers. In working on various aspects of Woolf's publication history and/or the history of modernist publishing, we faced the problems of archival dispersal, the vast scope of material, and the lack of any comprehensive book historical account of modernist publishing to orient or contextualize our findings. The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) was born in collective response to these barriers with the aim of using digital technology to create a “super collection” of books and publishing histories that empirically models theories in book history and literary sociology about the cultural production of texts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Hogarth Press, with two famous in-house writers, varied list, strategic marketing, and international reach, offers an ideal pilot study to inaugurate MAPP.
No single scholar can assimilate or adjudicate in isolation the holdings or intricate narrative history of The Hogarth Press, which published over five hundred books during the Woolfs’ stewardship up to 1946, and then another five hundred under the aegis first of Chatto & Windus (up to 1987) and then Random House (1987 to present). Digitizing, annotating, and reconfiguring the network relations amongst these diverse texts within the wider public sphere of modernist publishing is where MAPP aims to make a key intervention. It positions The Hogarth Press as both case study and catalyst to a broader understanding of how publishing houses as creative and business enterprises shaped the modernist movement and the discourses of twentieth-century culture. Our goal is to digitally reanimate the network history of publishing.
For those interested in Woolf, MAPP will enable scholars to trace the evolution of Woolf's writing practice alongside her work as editor, to ask new questions in the context of her editorial practice about contested theories within modernist studies—autonomy, professionalism, ethics, cosmopolitanism, gender, genre—and to rethink the construction of Woolf's privileged space as canonical modernist within the cultural field.