Virginia Woolf's essays

the long version

"Elena Gualtieri gives compelling reasons for reading Woolf's essays as the traces of a never-realised historical work that would have covered the whole panorama of English literature. Following tenaciously the multiple directions taken by Woolf's non-fiction, Gualtieri reveals the deep roots of the difficulties that besieged Woolf in the search for a form of writing that would accommodate her tangential vision of literary history. She shows how in the non-fiction Woolf moves between essays and sketches as the two poles within which her historical project comes to be defined, the essay as the embodiment of the modernist fragment, the sketch as a way of recovering the past through narrative form. In so doing, Gualtieri also outlines a powerful argument about the relationship between the verbal, the visual and memory in modernism that has implications which go beyond the limits of Woolf studies."--BOOK JACKET.