Content area
Full Text
Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace. Jeanne Dubino, ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) xv + 263pp.
Jeanne Dubino's collection Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace introduces readers to a wealth of resources examining Woolf's engagement with print culture. The volume's contributions reflect just how many dimensions there are to the literary marketplace and complicate existing conversations regarding publication history, composition practices, marketing, and modernism. Progressing from local to global contexts, the collection's four segments clearly organize a wide range of approaches to the development and reception of Woolf's oeuvre.
The opening section, "Woolf's Engagement with the Marketplace," investigates her reading, editing, and publication strategies. Beth Rigel Daugherty's "Reading, Taking Notes, and Writing: Virginia Stephen's Reviewing Practice" opens the segment with Woolf's apprenticeship as a book reviewer. Elizabeth Dickens in "Circulating Ideas and Selling Periodicals: Leonard Woolf, the Nation and Athenaeum, and Topical Debate," turns to the contexts shaping Virginia Woolf's work as she analyzes the publication's "Religious Belief Questionnaire." Vara Neverow examines Woolf's early response to contemporary audiences in "Woolf's Editorial Self-Censorship and Risk-Taking in Jacob's Room''' (57). Considering her revisions of the novel, Neverow argues that Woolf "weighs every word and conthis cocts an elaborate maze of coded and cross-referenced allusions" (68). Examining Woolf's reading and other contexts informing her writing, in the final contribution to this section, Jeanette McVicker interprets "several moments in Woolf's lifelong engagement with the Greeks as crucial to her struggle...