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Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language. Judith Allen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010) 133 pp. + x
Already 'other,' hybrid, provisional and resistant to definition, the 'essayistic' both expresses and enacts the inextricable connection between its aesthetics and politics - and given its resistance to all constraints, authorities and totalizing systems, it is forever seeking freedom. - Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language, 2
Judith Allen's Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language is a thoughtful and provocative book which ranges widely across Virginia Woolf s work, paying particular attention to her essays and to her "essayistic" writings. Allen begins by arguing for the importance of Michel de Montaigne as an influence on Woolf 's writing and for the centrality of essayistic thinking - and writing - to Woolf's work. At many points throughout her career, Woolf herself freely acknowledged her debt to Montaigne, and this premise alone would have been more than enough to fill the slight and eminently readable book that Allen has written. While there has been a welcome increase in attention to Woolf's essays in recent years, the hundreds of essays she wrote over the course of her career remain, with a few key exceptions (such as A Room of One 's Own, Three Guineas, "Modern Fiction," and "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown") largely unread in comparison with her novels, and the importance of the essayistic mode in her writing is still under-theorized and largely unrecognized by critics and common readers alike1 Allen moves beyond a consideration of the essay form in Woolf's writing to considering the ways in which the essayistic mode permeates her writing more generally. In this regard, Allen's book is a timely and welcome addition to Woolf scholarship and to a growing body of work on the essay itself.
Yet in addition to offering incisive readings of Woolf 's works, Allen pushes beyond the immediate parameters of this work to make bold and large-scale claims for the relevance of Woolf's ideas about language to post-9/11 politics and to the language in which those politics are presented to the public at large. Specifically, she is concerned with the ways in which language has been used and misused by the U.S. and British governments and the press (often...