Virginia Woolf: Feminism, Creativity, and the Unconscious

(Hardback)

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John R. Maze presents a penetrating psychoanalytic reading of Virginia Woolf's novels from first to last. Underlying their elegant, imaginative, mysterious texture there is revealed a network of sibling rivalry, incestuous attraction and exploitation, sexual repulsion, bizarre fantasies, anger and fatal despair. Woolf's feminism and pacifism, based on her conscious insight into an authoritarian society, were given passionate conviction by her resentment and irrational guilt over her half-brother's sexual aggression against her as a vulnerable girl. This found its place in her repressed animosity against her idealized mother, who she blamed not only for failing to protect her, but also for trying to impose the Victorian female sexist orthodoxy. Deeper still was the childhood conviction that her mother was complicit in the fantasied genital injuries - exacerbated later, she felt, by the males in her life - which prevented her from having children, as her envied sister had. Maze's approach not only reveals the intimate processes of Woolf's imagination, but yields a deeper and richer reading of her texts. An important study for all students and scholars of British 20th-century literature, feminist literary criticism, and critical theory in general.

Reviews

.,."[P]rovides a detailed psychoanalytical case study of a creative mind and its attempt at finding peace and resolution through literary expression....[T]he main value of this study lies in its solid textual work, and in its attempt to arrive at a fair assessment of Woolf's intentions."-English Literature in Transition
...[P]rovides a detailed psychoanalytical case study of a creative mind and its attempt at finding peace and resolution through literary expression....[T]he main value of this study lies in its solid textual work, and in its attempt to arrive at a fair assessment of Woolf's intentions.-English Literature in Transition
Maze generously fulfills his promise to provide a fascinating and profitable read for literary critics, psychoanalysts, feminists, Marxists and general readers alike....Virginia Woolf is a book which pays a fitting tribute to its subject.-Australian Journal of Psychotherapy
Virginia Woolf: Feminism, Creativity, and the Unconscious reads well...gives both scholars and general readers new ways to focus on the psychoanalytic premises which permeate all of Woolf's novels.-Woolf Studies Annual
..."Provides a detailed psychoanalytical case study of a creative mind and its attempt at finding peace and resolution through literary expression....The main value of this study lies in its solid textual work, and in its attempt to arrive at a fair assessment of Woolf's intentions."-English Literature in Transition
"Maze generously fulfills his promise to provide a fascinating and profitable read for literary critics, psychoanalysts, feminists, Marxists and general readers alike....Virginia Woolf is a book which pays a fitting tribute to its subject."-Australian Journal of Psychotherapy
"Virginia Woolf: Feminism, Creativity, and the Unconscious reads well...gives both scholars and general readers new ways to focus on the psychoanalytic premises which permeate all of Woolf's novels."-Woolf Studies Annual
..."[P]rovides a detailed psychoanalytical case study of a creative mind and its attempt at finding peace and resolution through literary expression....[T]he main value of this study lies in its solid textual work, and in its attempt to arrive at a fair assessment of Woolf's intentions."-English Literature in Transition

Author Bio

JOHN R. MAZE graduated from the University of Sydney, Australia, where he then lectured on psychoanalytic psychology and other aspects of psychological theory before resigning to become an independent researcher and consultant. Among his earlier publications are works on Woolf and Dostoevsky, as well as collaborative biographies of Harold Ickes and Henry Wallace.