Describe Of Books The Common Reader
| Title | : | The Common Reader |
| Author | : | Virginia Woolf |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Annotated Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 272 pages |
| Published | : | November 4th 2002 by Mariner Books (first published 1925) |
| Categories | : | Writing. Essays. Nonfiction. Classics. Books About Books. Criticism. Literary Criticism |
Virginia Woolf
Paperback | Pages: 272 pages Rating: 4.16 | 1361 Users | 87 Reviews
Commentary Toward Books The Common Reader
It’s appropriate that my 100th GR review should be a book that attempts to shift literary criticism from the hallowed office into the sitting room as all of us here on Goodreads are “the common reader”, a voice that in Woolf’s day barely existed. In the final essay she has a dig at (her) contemporary professional critics. I’m presently reading a novel which according to The New York Times Book Review and The Boston Globe is the work of a rare genius; the truth though is, as any common reader endowed with a functioning critical faculty would no doubt agree, that it’s simply a very ordinary novel with no distinguishing virtue. So can we trust professional critics now any more than we can trust marketing departments to give us an honest assessment of the worth of a book? The answer, of course, is no. To a far greater extent we can trust our fellow readers here.One of the overriding impressions here is that Woolf is much more generous and kind in her criticism than in her praise. My favourite essays were those on obscure writers of memoirs. None of these clearly had much literary merit and yet with what delight and affection she read them and how brilliantly she brought before our eyes the eccentricities of their authors. These were the ones that made me laugh out loud. That gave me a vivid sense of Virginia Woolf’s conversation at a dinner table. I’ve always imagined Woolf to be like a female Byron in conversation, witty, yes, a bit snotty but also expansive and ultimately self-effacing. Because of this it has always annoyed me that she is invariably portrayed on screen as some kind of mawkish, gibbering bag-woman as was the case in the recent BBC Bloomsbury drama and in Nicole Kidman’s interpretation of her in the film of The Hours.
On the other hand she tends to be a little mean and begrudging in her praise. She can write about Joyce: “Mr Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch or see.” Only to later dismiss Ulysses as a “memorable catastrophe”. Lawrence gets similar treatment. And the chapter on Emily Bronte is probably the most uninspired. It was her belief that Emily Bronte’s poems would outlive her novel. Wuthering Heights however can be found on every list of the greatest novels ever written, something not true of Conrad’s early work which Woolf, unusually, praises without reservations. So even Woolf wasn’t foolproof in her assessments. There’s also a sense of how competitive she is with both contemporaries and other women – a major factor in her friendship with Katherine Mansfield. There’s her famous comment about Middlemarch but then she will help us understand why it’s not as grown up as War and Peace where every relationship is so much more finely tuned and the imaginative reach of Tolstoy excels anything Eliot is capable of. She remarks that Eliot’s heroines talk too much and comments on “the fumbling which shook Eliot’s hand when she had to conceive a fit mate for her heroines.” And I remembered how Dorothea’s relationship with Ladislaw, written perhaps with all critical faculties in abeyance, borders on being the kind of young girl’s wish fulfilment liaison we expect from formulaic romantic fiction.
Above all else, reading this helped me understand the nature of the imperatives behind what Woolf wanted to achieve in her own work.
List Books In Pursuance Of The Common Reader
| Original Title: | The Common Reader |
| ISBN: | 015602778X (ISBN13: 9780156027786) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating Of Books The Common Reader
Ratings: 4.16 From 1361 Users | 87 ReviewsCriticize Of Books The Common Reader
Its appropriate that my 100th GR review should be a book that attempts to shift literary criticism from the hallowed office into the sitting room as all of us here on Goodreads are the common reader, a voice that in Woolfs day barely existed. In the final essay she has a dig at (her) contemporary professional critics. Im presently reading a novel which according to The New York Times Book Review and The Boston Globe is the work of a rare genius; the truth though is, as any common reader endowedIts appropriate that my 100th GR review should be a book that attempts to shift literary criticism from the hallowed office into the sitting room as all of us here on Goodreads are the common reader, a voice that in Woolfs day barely existed. In the final essay she has a dig at (her) contemporary professional critics. Im presently reading a novel which according to The New York Times Book Review and The Boston Globe is the work of a rare genius; the truth though is, as any common reader endowed
Woolf writes for her own time, which unfortunately, means that this book does not translate so well into our own. Save for some pieces written about great authors of literature who are still read (at least in some circles) today, such as Jane Austen, many of her essays are very easily ignorable because they have no familiarity or importance to today's reader; I had no knowledge about many, probably most, of the people she writes about. The book is not so much for the common reader as about
What strikes me in reading Virginia Woolf's nonfiction is how very much the context she's coming out of is strange to me. Her Common Reader, who might pick up Chaucer, and to whom Addison, Johnson, and Macaulay are familiar personages with no need for an identifying first name, even if he or she has not actually read them, is an alien creature. Despite her modernism, the context of her time, the newspapers in which these essays were originally printed, was one of people who were born in the 19th
Literary criticism without literary theory.
By turns delightful, instructive, and illuminating. I don't think I've done so much simultaneous marking and laughing aloud since school. One of the great pleasures was in learning about writers I knew nothing about, from the famous ones to the totally obscure. Woolf could summarize like nobody's business; she delighted in making long semi-coloned lists of absurdities (as I believe she remarked of some other writer in the collection); she could distill a writer's entire oeuvre into a few short,
This collection of essays (some original, many revised from publications for the Times Literary Supplement) was published in 1925 a month prior to Mrs. Dalloway, and apparently many of the critics who disliked the novel, admired this work. Most contemporary readers would invert that judgment, accepting the canonization of her modernist novels but finding the essays in this collection dated, still rooted, by and large, to a pre-war, perhaps even Victorian, style and tone. Feminist readers looking
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