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A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs. Dalloway. Monica Latham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) vii + 272pp.
Fiction following Woolf, that is, in some way featuring Woolf as a character or a muse, has a lively recent history in a variety of genres. Some examples: literary intrigue (Morgan, A Book for All or None); suspense (Barron, The White Garden); espionage (Hawkes and Manso, The Shadow of the Moth); sci-fi (Scott, I, Vampire); lesbian pulp (Pass, Zoe 's Book); biofiction, (Nunez, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury; Freeman, But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury; Sellers, Vanessa and Virginia). Perhaps the best-known of these recastings, Michael Cunningham's The Hours is the first of several contemporary novels discussed in Monica Latham's A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs. Dalloway. By limiting her readings to literary fiction following a single Woolf novel, she is able to elaborate on the style and structure both of what she calls (after Genette) Woolf's hypotext and the contemporary hypertexts which play off it. To organize her discussions, she groups the novels under the critical rubrics of her title. The book might have benefitted from reversing the title and subtitle. The readings of post-Woolf novels provide a fine commentary on the style of Mrs. Dalloway and the book brings attention to several novels not usually considered closely in their Woolfian contexts. It is, however, less successful in formulating a poetics of post-and neo-modernism because, while it uses these terms to differentiate various Dalloway successors, it does not offer new formulations of them.
The "rewriting" of the subtitle refers both to Woolf's own writing of the novel in its several versions, and to the hypertexts produced by later writers in a Woolfian afterlife. Latham's first chapter, in which she lays out the genetic dimension of Mrs. Dalloway by carefully recording the genesis and progress of its composition, is especially useful. Using Woolf's relevant notebooks, stories, and manuscript versions, referring as well to passages in her letters and diaries, Latham establishes what she calls somewhat infelicitously "Dallowayisms" (a term borrowed from Seymour Chatman) to pave the way for her later examinations of contemporary fictions. She argues that in order to best appreciate the impact Mrs. Dalloway has had on some subsequent writers, one must first...