Virginia Woolf and the Professions
Cambridge University Press, 7/28/2014
EAN 9781107070240, ISBN10: 1107070244
Hardcover, 256 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
This book explores Virginia Woolf's engagement with the professions in her life and writing. Woolf underscored the significance of the professions to society, such as the opportunity they provided for a decent income and the usefulness of professional accreditation. However, she also resisted their hierarchical structures and their role in creating an overspecialised and fragmented modernity, which prevented its members from leading whole, fulfilling lives. This book shows how Woolf's writing reshaped the professions so that they could better serve the individual and society, and argues that her search for alternatives to existing professional structures deeply influenced her literary methods and experimentation.
1. The ethics and aesthetics of medicine
2. Virginia Woolf, amateurism and the professionalisation of literature
3. Reconfiguring professionalism
Lily Briscoe and Miss La Trobe
4. Translating the fact of the professions into the fiction of vision
The Years and Three Guineas
5. A balancing act
Between the Acts and the aesthetics of specialisation.