1 Literature Review

As one of the leading modernist literary figures of the twentieth century,Virginia Woolf has remained a focus of research since her first novel,The Voyage Out,was published in 1915.The research covers some of Virginia Woolf's novels,short fictions,essays,her letters,diary entries,manuscripts,biography,and autobiography,which help her readers and researchers make sense of her life and works.The achievements of Woolf studies at home and abroad not only have laid a solid foundation for this book in a certain sense,but also have left a large space for this book to make a further exploration.Therefore,it is of significance to review Woolf studies to show the foundation on which this book is based and the innovation that this book aims to achieve.

1.1 Woolf Studies Abroad

According to Jane Goldman's The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf published in 2006,Woolf's critical reception has experienced the following stages: innovation,experimentalism and impressionism in the 1940s; philosophy,psychology and myth in the 1950s and 1960s; feminism,androgyny,modernism and aesthetics in the 1970s; feminism,postmodernism and sexual/textual politics in the 1980s; feminism,historicism,postcolonialism,ethics from the 1990s to the year 2005 (Goldman 127-134).Based on Jane Goldman's introduction to Woolf studies abroad,Pan Jian,a Chinese scholar,further introduces Woolf studies abroad ranging from the year 2004 to 2009 in her paper“A Review of Overseas Virginia Woolf Studies in the Past Five Years”published in 2010.In this paper,Professor Pan states that modernism,feminism,psychoanalysis,anthropology,ethics and spatial politics are the main critical perspectives of Woolf studies abroad.Since 2009,the annotation and historicist criticism have returned to be central in Woolf studies,which could be seen from the publications of Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language (2010),Virginia Woolf in Context (2012),some of the series of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf,including Virginia Woolf's influential novels,A Room of One's Own and Collected Short Fiction,and Frances Spalding's Virginia Woolf: Art,Life and Vision (2014).All of the research mentioned above has laid a solid foundation for later Woolf studies.Because achievements of Woolf studies seem to be numerous,it is of significance to select and introduce the most influential ones,which have inspired the writer of this book to explore some room for further studies on Virginia Woolf and her works.

Firstly,this part aims to introduce some of the most influential research achievements of Woolf studies abroad ranging from her contemporary reviews to those in 2005,which have inspired this research based on Jane Goldman's The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf.

Jane Goldman states that Virginia Woolf's contemporary reviewers and the 1940s researchers treated innovation,experimentalism and impressionism as the research focus of Woolf studies.Virginia Woolf was regarded by her contemporary reviewers as an innovator of stream-of-consciousness,experimental form,and impressionism and was compared with other contemporary writers,such as James Joyce,Dorothy Richardson and Marcel Proust.David Daiches studied Virginia Woolf's symbolism and aesthetics in Virginia Woolf (1942),which provided a theoretical framework for a further study on Virginia Woolf's modernist writing techniques.However,F.R.Leavis in“After To the Lighthouse”criticized Virginia Woolf's“sophisticated aestheticism”because he argued that Virginia Woolf's works failed to provide“moral interest and interest in action”(Leavis 296).Contrary to F.R.Leavis's argument,Erich Auerbach's“The Brown Stocking”,one chapter on Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse in his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature(1946) systematically studied how Virginia Woolf had represented the reality in her works from the perspectives of“point of view,narrative voice,time,interior and exterior consciousness,epistemology and fragmentation”(Goldman,The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf 128).

In the 1950s and 1960s,Woolf studies centered on philosophy,psychology,and myth.James Hafley's The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954),Walter Allen's The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954),Joseph Blotner's“Mythic Patterns in To the Lighthouse”(1956) studied Virginia Woolf's works from the perspectives of myth and psychology.The most influential one in this period was Jean Guiguet's Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1965).In this monograph,Jean Guiguet adopted existentialism and psychoanalysis to study the subjectivity of Virginia Woolf's works,setting a trend against materialist and historicist studies of Virginia Woolf's works.

In the 1970s and 1980s,Virginia Woolf's studies focused on“feminism,androgyny,modernism and aesthetics(Goldman,The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf 130).Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane in Modernism 1890-1930 (1976),and Peter Faulkner in Modernism (1977) studied Virginia Woolf's works from the modernist and aesthetic perspectives.Michele Barrett's Virginia Woolf on Women and Writing (1979),Carolyn Heilbrun's Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1982),Rachel Bowley's Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (1988),Alma Halbert Bond's Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography (1989),Madeline Moore's The Short Season Between Two Silences: The Mystical and Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf(1984),Jane Marcus's New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (1981),and Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (1987),“Art and Anger: Reading Like a Women”(1988) studied systematically Virginia Woolf's works from the feminist perspective.Alex Zwerdling's Virginia Woolf and the Real World (1986) was widely accepted as the landmark study of Virginia Woolf's works from the perspectives of politics and history.

From the 1990s to 2005,“feminism,postmodernism,sexual/textual politics”were heatedly discussed by Woolf researchers ( Goldman,The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf 132).Kathy J.Phillip's Virginia Woolf against Empire(1994) adopted postcolonialist theories to study Virginia Woolf's ambivalent views on empire.Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer in Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings (1997) adopted queer theories to study Virginia Woolf's works.David Bradshaw's“British Writers and Anti-Fascism in the1930s”(1997),Jessica Berman's Modernist Fiction,Cosmopolitanism,and the Politics of Community (2001),Anna Snaith's Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (2000),Linden Peach's Virginia Woolf: Critical Issues (2000),and Naomi Black's Virginia Woolf as Feminist(2004) studied Woolf's engagement with her political and historical contexts.Christine Froula's Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War,Civilization,Modernity (2005) studied Virginia Woolf's works from the perspectives of politics and modernism.

Secondly,from 2004 to 2009,Woolf's studies overseas continued to flourish and diversify in all their numerous and proliferating aspects,and focused on five main critical perspectives as follows: modernism,feminism,psychoanalysis,anthropology,ethics,and spatial politics (Pan Jian,“A Review of Overseas Virginia Woolf Studies in the Past Five Years”).

Pan Jian states that“one quarter of Woolf studies overseas from 2004 to 2008 were related to feminism,including females and historical creation and contribution,language and culture,tradition and inheritance,marriage and family,female and writing,female and wars,etc.”(Pan Jian,“A Review of Overseas Virginia Woolf Studies in the Past Five Years”124).Miglena Nikolchina's Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Krsiteva and Woolf (2004) was an influential book on Virginia Woolf's feminism,which adopted feminist theories of Kristeva and Woolf to study women's suppressed situation in a man-dominated world.Lyndall Gordon's“True Nature of Women”: From Wollstonecraft to Woolf (2004) and Laurel T.Ulrich's Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History(2007) stated that the well-behaved women could not be mentioned in history until they had done something abnormal as the“Other”.Some researchers integrated Virginia Woolf's family life,marriage and her works to make some comparative studies between Virginia Woolf and other female writers,such as Karyn Sproles's Desiring Women: The Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (2006),Thomas Szasz's“My Madness Saved Me”: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf (2006) and Mary Jean Corbett's Family Likeness: Sex,Marriage,and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (2008).

Critical interests overseas were Virginia Woolf's aesthetics,her narration of wars,and relation with market.Adopting theories of Freud,Bergson,and Benjamin,Gabrielle McIntire's Modernism,Memory,and Desire: T.S.Eliot and Virginia Woolf (2008) studied the text,body and desire in modernist works of T.S.Eliot and Virginia Woolf.Deborah Parsons's Theories of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce,Dorothy Richardson,Virginia Woolf (2007) studied three modernist writers' aesthetic ideology associated with their cultural,historical and political contexts.Kathryn Simpson's Gift,Markets and Economics of Desire in Virginia Woolf (2008) studied the gifts and giftgiving in the social,economic and political contexts,and explored Virginia Woolf's political views on gender and class.

According to Pan Jian,Woolf researchers were also fascinated with psychoanalysis when studying Virginia Woolf's works,and the influential studies were Sarah Ann Smith's“Until the Taxis Are Dancing with the Daffodils”: Merging the Internal and External Worlds in Virginia Woolf's Late Work (2004),and Arnold Weinstein's Recovering Your Story: Proust,Joyce,Woolf,Faulkner,Morrison (2006) ( Pan Jian,“A Review of Overseas Virginia Woolf Studies in the Past Five Years”128).All of the studies mentioned above emphasize that external events have an impact on authors' internal world.

In the same period,Woolf studies also focused on anthropology and ethics (Pan Jian,“A Review of Overseas Virginia Woolf Studies in the Past Five Years”129).American scholar Jane Marcus's Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (2004),after studying the works of Virginia Woolf,Nancy Cunard,Mulk Raj Anand,and Djuna Barnes,discovered that their works coincided with the decline of empire and the rise of fascism,and pointed out that they dealt with some cultural issues by delving themselves into“dark hearts”of imperialism and totalitarianism.AnnKatrin Jonsson pointed out ethics and the modernist subject were central in Ulysses,The Waves and Nightwood in his book Relations: Ethics and the Modernist Subject in James Joyce's Ulysses,Virginia Woolf's The Waves,and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (2000).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century,some researchers began to notice Virginia Woolf's views on spatial politics (Pan Jian,“A Review of Overseas Virginia Woolf Studies in the Past Five Years”130).Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place edited by Anna Snaith and Michael H.Whitworth was composed of eleven papers,which adopted the space criticism to study Virginia Woolf's works associated with the discourse as follows:gender,space,postcolonialism,science,countryside,city,and crossculture.This edited book laid a solid foundation for the further study of Virginia Woolf from the perspective of space criticism.

Thirdly,since 2009 when Pan Jian's review terminated,Woolf researchers have been interested in annotation and historicist criticism of Virginia Woolf's works.In annotation of Virginia Woolf's works,series of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf edited generally by Jane Goldman and Susan Sellers aimed to provide researchers and readers with a list of archival sources for manuscripts of Virginia Woolf's major works,proof material related,explanatory notes,textual apparatus and textual notes,associated with the historical,factual and literary allusions.Until the year 2015,four series have been published: The Waves (2011),Between the Acts (2011),The Years (2012),and Mrs.Dalloway (2015).

Besides,the historicist and politics criticism remained central in Woolf studies in recent years.Judith Allen's Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language (2010) studied Virginia Woolf's political consciousness hidden behind languages.Angeliki Spiropoulou's Virginia Woolf,Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (2010) studied how Virginia Woolf represented the past in her fictions and drew parallels between Woolf's historical concept and the concept of Walter Benjamin.Virginia Woolf in Context (2012) was composed of two parts: theoretical and critical reception,and historical and cultural context,in which the researchers not only reviewed Woolf studies but adopted some popular theories to explore the relation between her works and their historical contexts.Virginia Woolf and December 1910: Studies in Rhetoric and Context (2014) edited and introduced by Makiko Minow-Pinkney compiled some international distinguished Virginia Woolf's researchers' reflection on Virginia Woolf's announcement:“on or about December 1910 human character changed”,and studied the historical contexts,relation of Virginia Woolf's life and works,rhetorical complexities of the remark.Frances Spalding's Virginia Woolf: Art,Life and Vision (2014) was illustrated with over one hundred works from public and private collections,photographs and some extracts from Virginia Woolf's writings,which helped readers understand more about Virginia Woolf and the historical contexts in which her works were created.Besides,the International Virginia Woolf Society and Virginia Woolf Society of the Great Britain have held their own annual conferences to promote matters of interest to Woolf scholars and members.

While dealing with Virginia Woolf and her works adopting numerous diversified theories of literary criticism,Woolf studies have provided Woolf researchers and readers with various perspectives for better understanding of Virginia Woolf's works.Based on Woolf studies abroad,this book finds that it is initiative and challenging to study Virginia Woolf's modernist works systematically from the perspective of the New Historicism.

1.2 Woolf Studies in China

Virginia Woolf has aroused extensive enthusiasm of study in China since she was introduced to China in the late 1920s as one of the renowned modernist writers and“novelist Einstein”in Zhao Jingshen's World Literature in 1929.Ye Gongchao's Chinese translation of The Mark on the Wall was published in 1932,which was the earliest Chinese translation of Woolf's works.Chinese modernist writers of both Crescent Moon Society (founded by Xu Zhimo in 1923) and Beijing Group were influenced by Virginia Woolf,and they attempted to apply the stream of consciousness in their artistic creation.In the late 1940s,Zhdanovism from Russia dominated China's literary and art circle,which resulted in the suspension of Woolf studies.It was not until the end of the 1970s that Woolf studies began to bloom in Chinese academic world.From the early 1980s to the late 1990s,over 10 presses,including Shanghai Translation Publishing House and SDX Joint Publishing Company,published Chinese versions of Woolf's novels,polemical pamphlets and letters mainly translated by Qu Shijing,Liu Bingshan,Gu Qi' nan,Li Naikun and Wu Houkai.

Gao Fen reviewed Woolf studies in China ranging from 1949 to 2010 in her paper“Review and Analysis of Woolf Fiction Studies in China over the Past 60 Years”,and stated that“form and subject,theory of fiction,feminist criticism,post-modern criticism and comparative criticism”remained central in Woolf studies in China (Gao Fen 83).Based on Gao Fen's review,this book also introduces Woolf studies in China from the year 2011 to 2015.

The form and subject of Woolf studies in China is indebted initially to Qu Shijing,who studied form,structure and theme of Virginia Woolf's works in his papers“On Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse”(1982) and“Character,Theme,and Structure in Mrs.Dalloway”(1986).Qu Shijing's“Woolf,Stream of Consciousness and Comprehensive Art”(1987) pointed out that Virginia Woolf's modernist writing techniques were related to stream of consciousness and comprehensive art,including music,painting,movie,etc.Shen Fuying's“Narrative Methods and Time Order in Mrs.Dalloway”(2005) stated how Virginia Woolf in her Mrs.Dalloway integrated four connection methods,spatial connection,central stimulus connection,subject bridge connection,time cave connection,with four-time orders,clock time,subjective time,historical time and cosmic time.It is also worth mentioning that Shen Fuying's“Spiritual Fighting Process of the Characters in To the Lighthouse”(1999) pointed out that Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse provided her contemporaries with intellect,love and art to escape nihilism.Zhang Zhongzai's“Viewing To the Lighthouse”(2007) and Feng Wei's“The Beautiful Moments of Being in Life: Analysis of the Painting in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse”(2004) uncovered the painting factors in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.Zhu Haifeng and Shen Fuying's“Ideas of Antiviolence in Virginia Woolf's Works”(2014) studied how Virginia Woolf criticized the violence,explored its causes,and provided the way out of it.

The research of Woolf's theory of fiction was also indebted initially to Qu Shijing,who studied Virginia Woolf's theory of fiction in his paper“Virginia Woolf's Theory of Fiction”(1986),laying a solid foundation for Woolf studies in China on her theory of fiction.Yin Qiping's“Rethinking Woolf's Theory of Fiction”(2000) provided a systematic study of Virginia Woolf's theory of fiction.In“About Woolf's December 1910”(2003),Sheng Ning studied the historical contexts in which Virginia Woolf declared that“on or about December 1910 human character changed”,and pointed that it was misleading for some versions of Mr.Bennett and Mrs.Brown to use“human nature”,and explained the reasons based on the historical contexts in which she declared it.Hao Lin's“Woolf's Aesthetics”(2006) studied the relation between Virginia Woolf and the representatives of aesthetics,and explored their similarities in morality and artistic creation.Yang Lixin's“On Virginia Woolf's‘ Moments of Being'”(2013) studied how Virginia Woolf,in her works,recorded the significant moments of being in her life to express the eternity of life and time.

Chinese researchers are much more fascinated with Virginia Woolf's feminism and have achieved rich research achievements.Lin Shuming's“V.Woolf,in the Shadow of the War”(1996) stated that Virginia Woolf's criticism of war was linked with her criticism of patriarchy.Pan Jian's“Woolf's Critique of Patriarchy”(2008) not only studied how Virginia Woolf criticized the binary division of the public and private space,but also explored how Virginia Woolf attempted to establish a female kingdom.Wu Qinghong's Virginia Woolf and Feminism (2005) and Lǚ Hongling's Emotion＆ Reason: A Study of Virginia Woolf's Concept of Women's Writing (2007) also studied Virginia Woolf's feminism.In addition,Virginia Woolf's androgyny was also central in Woolf studies in China.Jiang Yunfei's“Androgyny and Creative Problem: On Woolf's Feminist Poetic Theory”(1999) and Li Juan's“Metonym and Metaphor: On Woolf's Narrative Language and Androgynous Consciousness”(2004) were the influential papers in terms of Virginia Woolf's androgynous studies.Pan Jian's“From Logagnosia to Heteroglossia: Virginia Woolf's Tracking Down Women's History”(2012) studied how Virginia Woolf in her works criticized the dominant male history and literary history,and advocated to reconstruct women's history and their literary history.

There are also considerable critical interests in postmodernist study,comparative studies and translation of Virginia Woolf's works.Du Zhiqing and Zhanyan's“A Text against Discipline and Powers: Rereading Mrs.Dalloway”(2007) adopted Michel Foucault's disciplinary power to study how Virginia Woolf criticized the social system.Xie Jiangnan's“The Image of the UK Empire in Woolf's Novels”(2008) studied Virginia Woolf's ambivalent attitudes between acceptance of the given system of the British Empire and dissatisfaction of the corrupt and haughty governing class.Qin Haihua's“Biography,Fiction and History: Postmodern Narrative Features of Orlando”(2010) studied how Virginia Woolf trespassed the generic border between biography and fiction by integrating the factual history and fictional history.Wu Qinghong's“Literary and Historical Narrative in Orlando”(2010) was the first study in China to systematically study Virginia Woolf's historical narratives in Orlando,and pointed out that Orlando was the product of both literature and history.Besides,Yang Lixin's Virginia Woolf in China (2009) was a model of Woolf comparative studies in China.In this book,Yang Lixin studied Virginia Woolf's literary relation with Crescent Moon Society(founded by Xu Zhimo) and Beijing Group (represented by Ling Shuhua),and the translation and acceptance of Virginia Woolf's works in China.

Besides the four perspectives concluded by Gao Fen,ecocriticism was another topic in Woolf studies in China.The most important and influential work on Virginia Woolf's ecological awareness was Professor Shen Fuying's A Study on Woolf's Ecological Awareness (2011).As the first monograph studying Virginia Woolf's works from the perspective of ecocriticism,A Study on Woolf's Ecological Awareness divided the concept of ecology into natural ecology,social ecology,spiritual ecology and interpersonal ecology,and systematically studied how Virginia Woolf established the harmonious relation of human and nature,human and society,human and human.Another paper worth mentioning is Shen Weiju's“Speaking for Nature and Women in Reality: An Eco-Feminist Reading of Virginia Woolf's Short Fictions”(2013),which studied Kew's Garden and Marks on the Wall from the perspective of eco-feminist criticism.

According to the studies of Virginia Woolf mentioned above as a whole,it is safe to conclude that Woolf researchers both abroad and in China have adopted a variety of literary theories,such as feminism,modernism,postmodernism,ecocriticism,postcolonialism,psychoanalysis,queer theory,expressionism,to study Virginia Woolf's works,and formed quite detailed and systematic studies on herself and her works.However,the research of Woolf's novels from the perspective of the New Historicism,compared with the studies above,has not received enough attention.This might be attributed to some biased views of Woolf researchers,who argue that modernist works represent“a flight from history into the mind of the individual”(Spiropoulou 2).In other words,modernist works including Virginia Woolf's modernist works“repudiated historical and political concerns and retreated to the elitist aethereality of pure aesthetics,consenting to the credo of ‘art for art's sake' as the principle of any ‘serious' and ‘authentic' art”(Spiropoulou 4).