The Voyage Out (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1593082290 ISBN 13: 9781593082291

Publisher: Sterling Publishing, 2005

Synopsis

&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LI&&RThe Voyage Out&&L/I&&R, by &&LB&&RVirginia Woolf&&L/B&&R, is part of the &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R&&LI&&R &&L/I&&Rseries, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R: &&LDIV&&R

• New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics &&L/I&&Rpulls together a constellation of influences―biographical, historical, and literary―to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R &&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&RWe meet young, free-spirited Rachel Vinrace aboard her father's ship, the &&LI&&REuphrosyne&&L/I&&R, departing London for South America. Surrounded by a clutch of genteel companions―among them her aunt Helen, who judges Rachel to be "vacillating," "emotional," and "more than normally incompetent for her years"―Rachel displays a startling maturity when she finds her engagement to the writer Terence Hewet listing toward disaster. As she soon discovers, "tragedies come in the hungry hours."&&LBR&&R&&LBR&&RPublished in 1915, &&LI&&RThe Voyage Out &&L/I&&Ris &&LB&&RVirginia Woolf&&L/B&&R's first novel, and it is written in a more traditional narrative style than the one she later perfected. But this maiden voyage predicts Woolf's future triumphs in its elegant delineation of the troubles plaguing modern life and its satire of the upper class. As Rachel's peculiar fellow passengers expand their minds with the ideas of Aristotle and Shelley, they meanwhile suffer from the societal ennui that education and sophistication cannot overcome.&&LBR&&R&&LBR&&RFilled with cutting insights about politics, literature, gender, and modern relationships, &&LI&&RThe Voyage Out&&L/I&&R is a finely perceived impression of the overriding confusion that immediately followed World War I.&&LBR&&R&&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R&&LSTRONG&&RPagan Harleman&&L/B&&R&&L/B&&R is a freelance writer and filmmaker living in New York City.&&L/P&&R&&L/DIV&&R

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

The Modern Library is proud to include Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out--together with a new Introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham. Published to acclaim in England in 1915 and in America five years later, The Voyage Out marks Woolf's beginning as one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and prolific writers.
Less formally experimental than her later novels, The Voyage Out none-theless clearly lays bare the poetic style and innovative technique--with its multiple figures of consciousness, its detailed portraits of characters' inner lives, and its constant shifting between the quotidian and the profound--that are the signature of Woolf's fiction.
Rachel Vinrace, Woolf's first heroine, is a motherless young woman who, at twenty-four, embarks on a sea voyage with a party of other English folk to South America. Guileless, and with only a smattering of education, Rachel is taken under the wing of her aunt Helen, who desires to teach Rachel "how to live."Arriving in Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, Rachel and Helen are introduced to a group of English expatriates. Among them is the young, sensitive Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer, with whom Rachel falls in love. But theirs is ultimately a tale of doomed love, set against a chorus of other stories and other points of view, as the narrative shifts focus between its central and peripheral characters. E. M. Forster praised The Voyage Out as "a book which attains unity as surely as "Wuthering Heights, though by a different path."
This edition includes a new Introduction by Michael Cunningham, bestselling author of "The Hours. Cunningham at once unfolds an engaging shortessay of Woolf's early life and career, an insightful exploration of the themes to which Woolf returns again and again in her fiction, and a spirited defense of the relevance and lasting importance of her art. Katherine Anne Porter wrote of Woolf: "The world of arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly."

From the Back Cover:

The Voyage Out (1915) is the story of a rite of passage. When Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship she is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage. Virginia Woolf knew all too well the forms that she was supposed to follow when writing of a young lady's entrance into the world, and she struggled to subvert the conventions, wittily and assiduously, rewriting and revising the novel many times. The finished work is not, on the face of it, a 'portrait of the artist'. However, through The Voyage Out readers discover Woolf as an emerging and original artist: not identified with the heroine, but present everywhere in the social satire, the lyricism, and the patterning of consciousness.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sterling Publishing
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1593082290
• ISBN 13: 9781593082291
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416