Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal

Reading Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpieces in light of her revisions of romantic intertexts, this book examines how she transforms sublime experience into a process of imaginative self-forming. Through readings of canonical texts such as A Room of One's Own to the often overlooked On Being Ill, Daniel T. O'Hara argues that these transformative moments displace the modern figure of individual male genius in favor of the democratic invention of female genius. Drawing on the work of theorists and scholars such as Harold Bloom, Perry Meisel, and Jane Goldman, this study places such ironic novels as Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves in the revisionary literary and critical tradition extending from the Elizabethans up to the contemporary moment.

Table of Contents:
1. Like Giving Birth to a Dead White Star: An Introduction To the Modern Sublime in Virginia Woolf 2. Burning Through Every Context: On Narrating The Modern Sublime in Jacob's Room 3. The Uncanny Muse of Creative Reading: On The New Cambridge Edition of Mrs. Dalloway 4. The Modern Sublime in To the Lighthouse 5. The Revisionary Muse in On Being Ill: Literary Politics, Modernist-Style 6. 'Unborn Selves' in The Waves 7. The Self-Revising Muse: On the Spirit of The Unborn Creator in A Room of One's Own 8. Coda: 'Images of Voice' and the Art of the Sublime

About the Author :
Daniel T. O'Hara is Professor of English and Inaugural Mellon Term Professor of Humanities at Temple University, USA. He is the author and editor or co-editor of fifteen books in modern literature and critical theory and the co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, contributing editor of American Book Review, and advisory editor of symploke and Annuals of Scholarship.

Review :
"One of the century's great writers, Virginia Woolf was also one of its greatest readers. In Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal, Daniel O'Hara demonstrates how Woolf's sensitive readings shape the exquisite character and sublime power of her own prose, which frequently combines the specific detail of modern experience with a grandeur associated with an earlier epoch. O'Hara's grounding in romanticism informs his revisionary interpretation of Woolf's modernism. As a result, O'Hara's study produces an aesthetically and historically rich understanding of not just Woolf's own corpus but also of the power of literature to shape ourselves and the worlds we inhabit." — Robert T. Tally Jr., Associate Professor of English, Texas State University, USA