Sentencing Orlando

Highlights the interconnected styles and contexts of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando by examining individual sentences
If the line is the privileged semantic unit in verse, we could ask whether the sentence plays the same role in prose. This possibility holds particular relevance for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, which presents an intriguing collage of different sentence styles. The present essay collection of 16 original essays offers fresh perspectives on Orlando through a unique attention to Woolf’s sentences. By focusing on single sentences in order to address the book’s many interlacing connections between aesthetics and context, it aims to recuperate Orlando as one of Woolf’s most dynamic textual experiments. To what extent does Orlando enact a politics of the sentence? How does Woolf’s manipulation of generic, gendered, sexual and racial boundaries play out on the level of the sentence? These are some of the questions that this timely volume engages. Contributors include: Jane de Gay, Jane Goldman, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Randi Koppen and Steven Putzel.

Key Features
Offers fresh close readings of Woolf’s Orlando on the level of the sentence, and draws out the sentence as an important textual unit as well as thematic and contextual conceptPresents the first book-length study of the novel in a readable and engaging format, combining forceful intellect and research with an alertness to the text’s unique playfulnessCovers a wide range of topics including sexuality, gender, materiality, intimacy, nationality, colonialism, religiosity, theatricality and literary intertextualityDemonstrates the value for literary studies of a methodological focus on single sentences that combines readings of contextual history, politics, gender, and art with close textual analysis