Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Coleridge, and Jane Ellen Harrison
In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) one of the markers of cultural difference between the protagonist and the gypsies she meets in Turkey is linguistic: they have no word for ‘beautiful’, and when Orlando wishes to remark the beauty of a sunset, she has to point and to say, in their language, ‘good t...
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| Format: | Journal article |
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Oxford University Press
2017
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| _version_ | 1826295106071691264 |
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| author | Whitworth, M |
| author_facet | Whitworth, M |
| author_sort | Whitworth, M |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) one of the markers of cultural difference between the protagonist and the gypsies she meets in Turkey is linguistic: they have no word for ‘beautiful’, and when Orlando wishes to remark the beauty of a sunset, she has to point and to say, in their language, ‘good to eat.’ In a recent edition of the novel, I suggested that Woolf’s source for the idea may have been Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, my annotation does not tell the entire story. The classicist and anthropologist Jane Ellen Harrison notes in her Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), that in at least two languages, Hebrew and what she calls ‘Mexican’, the word for ‘good’ meant ‘good to eat’. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T03:56:00Z |
| format | Journal article |
| id | oxford-uuid:c2e30a98-8a0b-4de5-b683-1659a2ec649e |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-07T03:56:00Z |
| publishDate | 2017 |
| publisher | Oxford University Press |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:c2e30a98-8a0b-4de5-b683-1659a2ec649e2022-03-27T06:12:19ZVirginia Woolf’s Orlando, Coleridge, and Jane Ellen HarrisonJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:c2e30a98-8a0b-4de5-b683-1659a2ec649eSymplectic Elements at OxfordOxford University Press2017Whitworth, MIn Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) one of the markers of cultural difference between the protagonist and the gypsies she meets in Turkey is linguistic: they have no word for ‘beautiful’, and when Orlando wishes to remark the beauty of a sunset, she has to point and to say, in their language, ‘good to eat.’ In a recent edition of the novel, I suggested that Woolf’s source for the idea may have been Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, my annotation does not tell the entire story. The classicist and anthropologist Jane Ellen Harrison notes in her Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), that in at least two languages, Hebrew and what she calls ‘Mexican’, the word for ‘good’ meant ‘good to eat’. |
| spellingShingle | Whitworth, M Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Coleridge, and Jane Ellen Harrison |
| title | Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Coleridge, and Jane Ellen Harrison |
| title_full | Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Coleridge, and Jane Ellen Harrison |
| title_fullStr | Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Coleridge, and Jane Ellen Harrison |
| title_full_unstemmed | Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Coleridge, and Jane Ellen Harrison |
| title_short | Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Coleridge, and Jane Ellen Harrison |
| title_sort | virginia woolf s orlando coleridge and jane ellen harrison |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT whitworthm virginiawoolfsorlandocoleridgeandjaneellenharrison |