Wild Outbursts of Freedom: Reading Virginia Woolf's Short Fiction

(Hardback)

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A pivotal figure in the world of novelists, Virginia Woolf was an outsider as a short story writer. Her stories form a large part of her output, but they were routinely sidelined in favor of her novels, which remain her pre-eminent literary legacy. Bringing together information from unpublished sources, Skrbic provides a long-overdue examination of Woolf's experiments with the short story form. Offering a model for the analysis of Woolf's short fiction, this book gives prominence to the way in which Woolf utilizes the short story's indeterminate frame to question the form, structure, and conventionalities of fiction. Scholars, students, and fans of Woolf will profit from this careful consideration of a neglected area of Woolf scholarship. Despite her popularity as a novelist, Woolf was among the very few writers of her generation to face the creative challenge of writing stories with no direct action, human content, or dialogue. For Woolf, writing short fiction was a displacement activity and the short story's marginal and detached framework lent an ideal shape to her thoughts. Here, Skrbic examines Woolf's commitment to and enthusiasm for exploring the genre's potential and looks at how her stories intersect with biography, ghost stories, and the short story cycle. Wild Outbursts of Freedom offers readers a unique opportunity to expand their understanding of Woolf and her work.

Reviews

"Honoring the hands-on tradition of short fiction theory, Skrbic brilliantly dissects Woolf's moth-wing prose without chloroforming it with jargon or nailing it to ideology. With refreshing eclecticism, she uses biographical sources (some of them previously untapped), cultural frames, discourse analyses, and genre typologies to lay before us, newly unfurled, the importance of Woolf's short fiction to its creator's life and to the development of the "anti-story" short story."-Susan Lohafer, Professor of English, The University of Iowa
"Professor Skrbic ably combines subtle and original close readings of Virginia Woolf's short fiction with insightful commentary on their literary, historical, and critical contexts. Readers of Woolf and of the modern short story in particular will find much to interest them in this impressive and engaging study."-Professor Susan Dick, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
Skrbic's approach to Woolf's short stories is original and stimulating ... There can be no doubt that Nena Skrbic's work on Virginia Woolf's short stories is the most ambitious to date. It is an intellectually stimulating read and provides many new insights and evaluations ... Anyone interested in this part of Woolf's output would derive great benefit from this book.-Virginia Woolf Bulletin
"Skrbic's approach to Woolf's short stories is original and stimulating ... There can be no doubt that Nena Skrbic's work on Virginia Woolf's short stories is the most ambitious to date. It is an intellectually stimulating read and provides many new insights and evaluations ... Anyone interested in this part of Woolf's output would derive great benefit from this book."-Virginia Woolf Bulletin

Author Bio

NENA SKRBIC is currently tutor of English language and literature at Thomas Danby College of Further Education, Leeds, England. From 1999-2002 she was a member of the Editorial Committee of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, U.K.