Woolf’s crotchets: textual cryogenics in To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927) is – as is well known – punctuated by a number of angular vertical marks. Within these marks, which are the square brackets known as crotchets (as opposed to the round brackets known as lunulae), certain events take place. A man, reading Virgil, blows out...

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Үндсэн зохиолч: McLoughlin, K
Формат: Journal article
Хэл сонгох:English
Хэвлэсэн: Taylor & Francis 2014
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author McLoughlin, K
author_facet McLoughlin, K
author_sort McLoughlin, K
collection OXFORD
description Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927) is – as is well known – punctuated by a number of angular vertical marks. Within these marks, which are the square brackets known as crotchets (as opposed to the round brackets known as lunulae), certain events take place. A man, reading Virgil, blows out a candle. Another man misses his wife who has just died. A young woman gets married. She dies after childbirth. Young men are killed by a shell in a war. The first man publishes a successful collection of war poetry. Another woman has her bag carried up to a house. A boy cuts a square from a fish to bait his rod. The woman whose bag was carried up contemplates the sea. This article considers what might connect these passages, already distorted in the paraphrasing. Does the fact that they are, uniquely in the novel, enclosed in crotchets indeed require them to be read as connected? The article proposes a re-orientation of critical readings of Woolf’s crotchets from a horizontal, hierarchical, elegiac axis informed by the aesthetics of Post-Impressionism to a vertical axis of eulogy and (life-)preservation sited in the context of the First World War.
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spelling oxford-uuid:13b62c20-7ae4-4311-a97a-90599749c9082023-09-26T08:51:44ZWoolf’s crotchets: textual cryogenics in To The LighthouseJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:13b62c20-7ae4-4311-a97a-90599749c908LiteratureEnglishORA DepositTaylor & Francis2014McLoughlin, KVirginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927) is – as is well known – punctuated by a number of angular vertical marks. Within these marks, which are the square brackets known as crotchets (as opposed to the round brackets known as lunulae), certain events take place. A man, reading Virgil, blows out a candle. Another man misses his wife who has just died. A young woman gets married. She dies after childbirth. Young men are killed by a shell in a war. The first man publishes a successful collection of war poetry. Another woman has her bag carried up to a house. A boy cuts a square from a fish to bait his rod. The woman whose bag was carried up contemplates the sea. This article considers what might connect these passages, already distorted in the paraphrasing. Does the fact that they are, uniquely in the novel, enclosed in crotchets indeed require them to be read as connected? The article proposes a re-orientation of critical readings of Woolf’s crotchets from a horizontal, hierarchical, elegiac axis informed by the aesthetics of Post-Impressionism to a vertical axis of eulogy and (life-)preservation sited in the context of the First World War.
spellingShingle Literature
McLoughlin, K
Woolf’s crotchets: textual cryogenics in To The Lighthouse
title Woolf’s crotchets: textual cryogenics in To The Lighthouse
title_full Woolf’s crotchets: textual cryogenics in To The Lighthouse
title_fullStr Woolf’s crotchets: textual cryogenics in To The Lighthouse
title_full_unstemmed Woolf’s crotchets: textual cryogenics in To The Lighthouse
title_short Woolf’s crotchets: textual cryogenics in To The Lighthouse
title_sort woolf s crotchets textual cryogenics in to the lighthouse
topic Literature
work_keys_str_mv AT mcloughlink woolfscrotchetstextualcryogenicsintothelighthouse