Modern Classics Waves (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141182717 ISBN 13: 9780141182711

Publisher: Penguin Classic, 2000

Synopsis

A formally innovative work of modernist fiction, Virginia Woolf's The Waves is edited with an introduction by Kate Flint in Penguin Modern Classics. More than any of Virginia Woolf's other novels, The Waves conveys the full complexity and richness of human experience. Tracing the lives of a group of friends, The Waves follows their development from childhood to youth and middle age. While social events, individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that expresses the inner life of its characters: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation. Separately and together, they query the relationship of past to present, and the meaning of life itself. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers, which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. If you enjoyed The Waves, you might like Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, also available in Penguin Classics. 'A book of great beauty and a prose poem of genius' Stephen Spender 'Full of sensuous touches ... the sounds of her words can be velvet on the page' Maggie Gee, Daily Telegraph

About this title

Book Description

This edition will be the most extensive and authoritative, the most fully collated, scrupulously researched and explicated text available to scholars to date, and for considerable time to come. Based on the first edition of Woolf's most challenging novel, this volume is an essential purchase for libraries and scholars.

From the Back Cover

"Clear, bright, burnished, at once marvelously accurate and subtly connotative. The pure, delicate sensibility found in this language and the moods it expresses are a true kind of poetry." "The New York Times
""The Waves" is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, standing with those few works of twentieth-century literature that have created unique forms of their own. In deeply poetic prose, Woolf traces the lives of six people from infancy to deathas theyfleetingly unite around the unseen figure of a seventh, Percival. Allusive and mysterious, "The Waves" yields new treasures upon each reading.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel. The author of numerous novels, collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.
Mark Hussey, general editor of Harcourt's annotated Woolf series, is professor of English at Pace University in New York City and editor of the Woolf Studies Annual.
Molly Hite is professor of English at Cornell University. She is the author of" Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative," and two novels, "Class Porn "and "Breach of Immunity." She has written articles on postmodernist and modernist fiction, feminist theory and practice, and academic culture.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classic
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0141182717
• ISBN 13: 9780141182711
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Flint Kate