Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy: (Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing)

In Woolf's writings Greece and Greek tragedy in particular shape an exoticized aesthetic space that both emerges from and enables critique of the cosy settings and colonialist conceits of elite (and largely male) British attitudes toward culture and politics. Rather than highlighting Woolf's exclusion from male intellectual purviews, as so many scholars have emphasized, this book urges attention on how her engagements with Greek tragedy both collude with and challenge modernist aesthetics and contemporary politics. Woolf's encounters with and uses of Greek tragedy fantasize an alternative perceptual capacity that correlates to feminine (and feminist) modes, which are depicted in her writings as alternately defiant and choral. In this scheme, Greek tragedy is something of a dreamland, the mysterious dynamics of which Woolf treats as transcending cultural attitudes that hinge upon imperialist adventuring and violence. As scholars have recognized, especially in recent decades, the exoticizing gestures central to the work of so many modernists have uncomfortable political underpinnings, since they frequently inhabit imperialist and colonialist perspectives while appearing to critique them. Unlike most scholars, Nancy Worman argues that Woolf is no exception, although the feminism and humour that inflects so many "Greek" elements in her work saves it from the worst offenses.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: (En)gendering Greece 1. Gender and Primitivist "Greek" Aesthetics 2. Electra and the Materialities of Tragic Language 3. Female and "Natural" Choral Voices Epilogue: Antigone and Her Siblings Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Nancy Worman is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Barnard College and Columbia University, New York, USA. She is the author of articles and books on style, performance, and the body in Greek literature and culture. Her most recent book is Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism (2015).

Review :
Worman is one of the most illuminating scholars working on Greek tragedy today … The book exemplifies what classical reception can pull off at its best ... As the first installment of the Bloomsbury series Classical Receptions in Twentieth Century Writing, it sets a high bar for the rest of the series … A critical triumph without the cultural triumphalism. Innovative and suggestive in approach. Both a passionate companion piece to Woolf's writings, and a formidable study of Greek tragedy and its radical validity. Worman is an inspiring classicist, and a remarkable close reader of modern literature ... She has an extraordinary eye for detail, a superb sensibility for fleshing out what might be lost in the pace of narrative praxis and reading action, a riveting gift for creating connections between texts, concepts, moments in time and in the history of stories. Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy is written to feel like a live delivery, an in vivo presentation at a thriving, throbbing, distinctly vocal convention. It has remarkable intimacy and directness. This welcome volume explores how Woolf's interactions with Greek tragedy contributed to the formation of what Worman (classics and comparative literature, Barnard and Columbia) terms a 'tragic aesthetics' in her novels and selected essays, particularly those of the 1920s and 1930s. A specialist in Greek drama, Worman focuses on Woolf's engagement with representations of gender in the tragedies as the author shaped her evolving aesthetics of loss as a modernist and feminist writing in an era of late British imperialism and postwar recovery … Summing Up: Recommended. This is an arresting and much-needed work; it is an imaginative, innovative analysis of the ways in which Greek tragedy informed Woolf's sociopolitical imagination and textual aesthetics. Even more importantly, through its insightful analysis of the ways in which the figures of Electra and Antigone influenced Woolf's work, this study reveals (even if obliquely) the manifold ways in which classical Greek texts can still inform fruitful avenues of contemporary resistance to the multiple injustices still perpetrated predominantly against women. Nancy Worman offers a feisty feminist account of Virginia Woolf's tragic aesthetics, revolving around “her sense that patriarchy makes tragedies of all women's lives.” With classical expertise and critical sophistication, Worman illuminates how the gendered dynamics of Greek tragedy are played out in Woolf's essays and novels, in the embodiment of fierce tragic heroines like Electra and Antigone and in the interplay of choral voices. This fascinating book teaches us new ways to read Virginia Woolf through Greek tragedy, and Greek tragedy through Virginia Woolf-with a renewed sense of urgency for contemporary readers.