Making of a New Virginia Woolf Icon, The

College Literature, Summer 2005 by Clewell, Tammy

To gauge by the "Postscript" concluding the book, Cuddy-Keane shares the value Woolf placed on an intellectual reading public, "a democratic highbrowism that might well mark, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the most promising global pathway to a more peaceful, productive world" (2003, 196). All the more admirable, then, is Cuddy-Keane's willingness to critique Woolfs work. The essays Woolf wrote to foster a classless and informed readership perpetuate certain associations between intellectualism and elitism. Moreover, the stylistic approach she developed to engage previously unheard voices has limited application to our own contemporary moment. As successful as Woolf was in developing "what was at the time a revolutionary style" (2003, 195), Cuddy-Keane neither models her own writing on the plasticity and open-endedness ofWoolf's expository prose nor shies away from suggesting that Woolfs refusal to assume an authoritative narrative position, as productive as that refusal was, ran the risk of obscuring her efforts to effect radical social change. The difficult battles of the 1970s courageously waged by feminist critics to claim Woolf 's writing for serious, academic study have ended. Yet, insofar as the very best work on Woolf being done at the present appears to be inflected by forms of author-worship, inflected by a rhetoric of praise and relevance rather than critique and historical distance, contemporary Woolf scholarship might well be locked into the maneuverings of a fight already won. To the extent that academics invested in Woolf 's work, myself included, persist in holding onto an image of a writer untarnished by shortsightedness, difficulties or limits, Cuddy-Keane offers a fresh approach to our Woolf image-making. Her study registers the meanings that not only connect us to but also separate us from the life and writings ofVirginia Woolf.

Works Cited

Lyotard,Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition:A Report on Knowledge.Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Showalter, Elaine, 1977. A Literature ofTlieir Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Silver, Brenda R. 1999. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Spilka, Mark, 1980. Virginia Woolf s Quarrel With Grieving. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Tammy Clewell is assistant professor of English at Kent State University. She is currently finishing a book-length manuscript on the politics of mourning in the twentiethcentury British novel.