Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf's Short Fiction

In Trespassing Boundaries , ten contemporary Woolf scholars discuss a broad range of Woolf's short stories. Despite being now easily available these stories have not yet received the attention they deserve. Complex yet involving, they deserve to be read not only for the light they shed on the novels, but in their own right, as major contributions to the short fiction as a genre. This volume places Woolf's short stories in the context of modernist experimentalism, then explores them as ambitious attempts to challenge generic boundaries, undercutting traditional distinctions between short fiction and the novel, between experimental and popular fiction, between fiction and nonfiction. Collectively the essays suggest that Woolf's contribution to the short story is as important as her contribution to the novel.

Table of Contents:
Foreword; S.Dick Introduction; K.Benzel & R.Hoberman PART I: WOOLF'S SHORT FICTION IN THE CONTEXT OF BRITISH MODERNISM 'Through a Glass, Longingly'; J.Trautmann Banks 'Virginia Woolf's 'Shorter, More Concentrated Form of Fiction''; M.Levy 'Collecting, Shopping, and Reading: Virginia Woolf's Stories about Objects'; R.Hoberman 'The Lesbian Intratext of Virginia Woolf's Shorter Fiction'; K.Colburn 'Woolf and Chekhov'; N.Skrbic PART II: WOOLF'S SHORT FICTION AS GENERIC BOUNDARY-BREAKER ''A Corridor Leading from Mrs. Dalloway to a New Book': Virginia Woolf Revising'; B.Rigel Daugherty A View of One's Own': Writing Women's Lives and the Early Short Stories'; A.Snaith 'Verbal Painting in Virginia Woolf's Short Fiction: Lyricism in Monday or Tuesday'; K.N.Benzel 'Cultivating Kew: Showing the Seeds of Critique, 1909'; A.Staveley

About the Author :
KATHRYN N. BENZEL is Professor of English and Director of First-Year Program at the University of Nebraska-Kearney, USA. She is author of Charleston: A Voice in the House (1998), and co-author of Images of the Self as Female: The Achievements of Women Artists in Re-Envisioning the Feminine Identity (1992). She has also written several journal articles. RUTH HOBERMAN is a Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, USA. she is co-author of The McGraw-Hill Guide to World Literature (1984) and author of Modernizing Lives: Experiments in English Biography 1918-1939 (1987) and Gendering Classicism: The Ancient World in Twentieth Century Women's Historical Fiction (1997).

Review :
"Trespassing Boundaries is an excellent collection of insightful and significant essays. Edited by the distinguished scholar-critics Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman - who themselves have contributed invaluable essays - this splendid volume will point the way to a reconsideration of Woolf's work in the genre of short fiction." - Daniel R. Schwarz, Professor of English and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Cornell University "Trespassing Boundaries is a very welcome addition to Virginia Woolf studies and to narrative theory. The ten essays offer rich explorations from diverse viewpoints of Woolf's wonderful and provocative experiments in short fiction. Woolf scholars and narrative theorists will be consulting these essays for many years to come." - James Phelan, author of Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration and editor of Narrative "Scholars will appreciate the detailed readings of these short pieces and the thoughtful use of varied critical lenses to illuminate these often undervalued pieces. Each essay brings new insights and useful information which will inspire critics to see the stories afresh. This volume will be useful, too, for anyone who teaches Woolf. It provides new ways to consider the frequently anthologized pieces - 'Kew Gardens' and 'Mark on the Wall' for example - but more imoprtantly, it will inspire many to include more of Woolf's shorter works in their syllabi not as examples of warm-ups for hergreat novels, but as complex, multivalent and engaging works in their own right." - Danell Jones, University of Montana, Bozeman