Books for Engl 814: Woolf and Eliot Seminar

E.K. Sparks—Fall 2002

Please read descriptions of books and decide which you need to buy. Much of the early work of both authors is available on-line; however, print-outs of longer works are hard to handle and keep track of. Books are available at the Clemson Newsstand. Support your local, independent booksellers, and buy at the Newsstand, if possible. Stephen and Fara have also begun ordering a few copies of selected remaindered titles by and about Woolf and Eliot. You can get cheap copies of Eliot’s juvenelia, Woolfs essays, and various biographical and critical studies at the Newsstand as well. Fara and Stephen at the Newsstand will also order any books you need; they offer a 15% discount on all hardbacks.

All books will be on reserve at the library

Required List

Whatever you need of Eliot's poetry

Kermode edition of Eliot's Prose

One of two critical books on Eliot

Monday or Tuesday by Woolf or Complete Shorter Fiction

A Room of One's Own by Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf (perhaps not, see note below)

To the Lighthouse by Woolf

The Waves by Woolf

Maybe Between the Acts by Woolf

Hussey book on Woolf

Recommended List

Hermione Lee biography of Woolf (now available in paperback)

T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life by Lyndall Gordon $18.95

Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land

Books by and about Eliot

Collected Poems, 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot List Price$23.00 Hardcover (December 1963) Harcourt Brace; ISBN0151189781 ;

This is the definitive edition of Eliot’s poetry. Buy this if you want everything. Much of the early poetry up to and including The Waste Land is now out of copyright in the US and is available on-line. You can get almost everything we are reading in class by buying the two tiny Harcourt volumes: Selected Poems and Four Quartets, or the new Dover Thrift Edition. If you want to read Eliot's previously unpublished (and shockingly obscene) juvenilia, you'll need to buy Inventions of the March Hare,. If you are really hot on The Waste Land, you may want to buy the Facsimile Edition or the Norton Critical Edition which contains many classic critical essays.

Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Frank Kermode (Editor) List Price$13.00 Paperback (November 1975) Harcourt Brace; ISBN0156806541

Please buy this edition of Eliot’s prose. The complete text of The Sacred Wood is on-line, but all the middle and later prose we will be reading is collected conveniently in the Kermode.

Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays by Jewel Spears Brooker (Editor) Paperback - 203 pages (December 1988) Modern Language Association of America; ISBN0873525140 $18.00

This MLA volume has a good bibliographical introduction as well many essays focused on teaching Eliot’s poetry and plays.

The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, ed. By David A. Moody. Cambridge Univ Pr (Pap Txt); ISBN: 0521421276; (November 1994) $22.00

This excellent collection of essays is more recent than Booker. The essays are also a bit more sophisticated, being written for a scholarly rather than pedagogical audience.

Books by and about Woolf

Monday or Tuesday (Dover Thrift Editions)

Buy the Dover Edition. It’s only a dollar, and that way we will all be on the same page.

The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf , ed by Susan Dick List Price$14.00 Paperback - 346 pages New edition (June 1989) Harcourt Brace; ISBN0156212501

Buy this if you are particularly interested in Woolf and want a convenient compilation of all her short fiction. The short stories we are reading from Monday or Tuesday are all in this volume, so don’t buy both.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, intro by Mary Gordon. List Price: $10.00 Paperback ‑ 114 pages Reissue edition (January 1990) Harcourt Brace; ISBN: 0156787334

I have ordered the latest Harcourt/Brace editions of all of Woolf’s works. These are the definitive editions-- if you write anything for publication on Woolf, you must refer to these page numbers. I would appreciate as many people as possible getting these editions so that we will all have the same page numbers for class discussion.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Maureen Howard ed. List Price$12.00 Paperback - 194 pages (October 1990) Harcourt Brace; IISBN0156628708

Do we want to do both Mrs. D and To the Lighthouse? That puts a big emphasis on Woolf’s early, more standardly Modernist work. If we dropped Mrs. D., we could do both Waves and Between the Acts.. On the other hand, Mrs. D makes an elegant comparison to The Waste Land….

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty Intro. List Price$12.00Paperback - 209 pages (January 1990) Harcourt Brace; ISBN0156907399

Between the Acts or The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf A to Z A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers and Common Readers to Her Life, Works and Critical Reception by Mark Hussey. List Price$19.95 Paperback (December 1996) Oxford Univ Pr (Trade); ISBN0195110277

If you are at all interested in Woolf, Mark Hussey’s mini-encyclopedia is a huge bang for your bucks. Has wonderful summaries of all works, which include sections describing major critical treatments as well as entries on terms, ideas, historical events, and figures which illuminate many allusions in Woolf’s text.

Other Books to Buy/ Read

Biographies

If you have time, I would recommend reading a biography of either Woolf or Eliot, or both if you are really interested.

Eliot did not want an official (or any) biography written, so there has been a good deal of controversy over the inevitable contravening of his wishes.

Ø Lyndall Gordon has come closest to producing something approaching a definitive biography with some assistance from the Eliot estate. She came out with Eliot’s Early Years in 1977, a well received treatment of Eliot’s work up through the Waste Land which offered insight into hitherto unpublished early writing. A second volume covering Eliot’s post-conversion life and works, Eliot’s New Life, appeared in 1988. In 2000, she combined and extensively revised the two-volumes into one; T.S. Eliot: An Uneventful Life is able to deal more frankly with his misogyny and certain aspects of his personal life due to the publication of new material including poems in March Hare.

Ø In 1984, Peter Ackroyd wrote an unsanctioned, very readable biography.

Ø Just out is Painted Shadow by Carole Seymour-Jones This is a biography of Eliot’s first wife Vivien and sheds much light –-mostly lurid -- on Eliot’s emotional life.

Woolf, on the other hand, has had a plethora of biographical treatments.

Ø Quentin Bell’s 1972 Virginia Woolf: A Biography is the "definitive", family-authorized biography. As her nephew, Bell had access to all family papers but has been widely accused of over-idealization and trivialization for discounting Woolf’s feminism and political views, naively accepting Dr.'s views of Woolf's "madness," and covering up or discounting the significance of childhood sexual abuse and Woolf’s lesbianism.

Ø Lyndall Gordon also wrote Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life in 1985. Genial and well-written, her biography extends the authorized portrait in Bell by adding in discussion of the evolution of the writing. (Gordon did write an essay on Woolf and Eliot, which we will read for class.)

Ø Perhaps the most controversial biographical treatment of Woolf in recent years is Louise DeSalvo’'s Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. This revolutionary re-assessment of effect of childhood molestation on Woolf's life and works integrates feminist scholarship on abuse, reinterpreting the novels as polemic against power of males in family; reasoning may be somewhat circular.

Ø Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Alfred A. Knopf. 1997. This recent biography has been critically well-received. It is meticulously researched and written with charm, wit, and humanity. While the volume of scholarship on Woolf has reached such proportions that no one can cite everything, Lee does a good job of rounding up all primary source material, and her judgments on controversial issues always seem measured and humane. Will probably replace Bell as the definitive biography.

Ø In my opinion, the best of several psychological discussions of Woolf’s life is Thomas Caramagno’s The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness. (1992) . Balanced and perceptive, he argues that VW suffered from manic-depressive cycles like much of her family, in the process debunking many psychoanalytic interps as over-complicated and fanciful. Defends Woolf's fundamental sanity and creativity.

Ø Reid, Panthea. Art and Affection: Life of Virignia Woolf. NY:Oxford UP, 1996. A fairly new biography which takes advantage of the vast amount of new material made available to focus especially on Woolf’s relationship to the arts and to her sister Vanessa.