Layered Rhythms: Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.

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Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence

10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694419.001.0001 ◽

2015 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Keyword(s):

Cultural Differences ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Katherine Mansfield ◽

Anton Chekhov ◽

Evelyn Waugh ◽

Literary Influence ◽

Artistic Production ◽

Key Issues ◽

John Middleton Murry

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence seeks to understand influence, a powerful yet mysterious and undertheorised impetus for artistic production, by exploring Katherine Mansfield’s wide net of literary associations. Mansfield’s case proves that influence is careless of chronologies, spatial limits, artistic movements and cultural differences. Expanding upon theories of influence that focus on anxiety and coteries, this book demonstrates that it is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can register as satire, yearning, copying, homage and resentment. This book maps the ecologies of Mansfield’s influences beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that it roams wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence identifies Mansfield’s involvement in six modes of literary influence - Ambivalence, Exchange, Identification, Imitation, Enchantment and Legacy. In so doing, it revisits key issues in Mansfield studies, including her relationships with Virginia Woolf, John Middleton Murry and S. S. Koteliansky, as well as the famous plagiarism case regarding Anton Chekhov. It also charts new territories for exploration, expanding the terrain of Mansfield's influence to include writers as diverse as Colette, Evelyn Waugh, Nettie Palmer, Eve Langley and Frank Sargeson.

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