Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Vision / / Claudia Olk.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DGBA Backlist Complete English Language 2000-2014 PART1
• VerfasserIn: Olk, Claudia,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series , 45
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (202 p.)

The category of vision is significant for Modernist texts as well as for the unfolding discourse of Modernism itself. Within the general Modernist fascination with the artistic and experimental possibilities of vision and perception this study looks at Virginia Woolf’s novels and her critical writings and examines the relation between visuality and aesthetics. An aesthetics of vision, as this study argues, becomes a productive principle of narrative. The visual is not only pertinent to Woolf’s processes of composition, but her works create a kind of vision that is proper to the text itself – a vision that reflects on the experience of seeing and renegotiates the relation between the reader and the text. The study investigates key dimensions of aesthetic vision. It addresses vision in the context of theories of aesthetic experience and identifies a semantics of seeing. It analyses functions of symbolic materiality in the presentation of boundaries of perception, modes of temporality and poetic potentialities. In exploring the connections between vision and language, it seeks to provide new perspectives for a reassessment of what occurs in Modernism's relation to vision.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1 Aesthetic Vision and Experience -- 2 Modalities of the Gaze: Windows, Mirrors, and the Veil -- 3 The Temporality of Aesthetic Vision -- 4 The Poetry of Aesthetic Vision in The Waves -- Conclusion -- Bibliography