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This work argues that Virginia Woolf's preoccupation with the literary past had a profound impact on the content and structure of her novels. It analyses her reading and writing practices via her essays, diaries and notebooks to provide a framework for this argument.

The authors explore a range of different approaches to the languages of theatre, including translation and interpretation of the art form, along with languages, performance work, body language and gesture. Considered alongside the related social issues of race, class and dialect, the following questions emerge: * What is the role of language in theatre today? * Whose language is English; what other languages do women making theatre use? * What does it mean to write about, photograph and video live performance? * What is the future for women's theatre in an international context increasingly united by new technologies but divided by new issues of cultural diversity? Goodman and de Gay analysis covers issues that are central to current courses in Theatre and Performance and Women's Studies. They assess the forms which women as theatre-makers have chosen to explore in the age of new technology, and look at some of the different definitions of 'theory' offered by theatre-makers and critics including Caryl Churchill, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigiray and Julia Kristeva.The authors explore a range of different approaches to the languages of theatre, including translation and interpretation of the art form, along with languages, performance work, body language and gesture. Considered alongside the related social issues of race, class and dialect, the following questions emerge: * What is the role of language in theatre today? * Whose language is English; what other languages do women making theatre use? * What does it mean to write about, photograph and video live performance? * What is the future for women's theatre in an international context increasingly united by new technologies but divided by new issues of cultural diversity? Goodman and de Gay analysis covers issues that are central to current courses in Theatre and Performance and Women's Studies. They assess the forms which women as theatre-makers have chosen to explore in the age of new technology, and look at some of the different definitions of 'theory' offered by theatre-makers and critics including Caryl Churchill, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigiray and Julia Kristeva.

Paying less attention to well-known modernist poets such as T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound, Kopley focuses, rather, on Woolf's interactions with poets amongst her friends and family, including her debates on the nature of poetry with her nephew Julian Bell, and with Thirties Poets W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and John Lehmann. In this short response to Kopley's book, I would like to explore the elegiac form of Woolf's work further, but by setting Woolf's appreciation of poetry back in the context of her belief in, and practice of, generic fluidity. [...]many of the great English poems now seem to me inseparable from my father\" (Maitland 476). Beth Rigel Daugherty, for example, has recently shone a light on Stephen's liberal attitude toward his daughters' education, noting that \"Virginia and Vanessa were encouraged to pursue their interests in literature and art, and to give Leslie credit, this encouragement increased after Julia's death\" (17).2 This complexity can be seen in Woolf\"s allusions to Milton's \"Nativity Ode\" (1629) in The Voyage Out (1915), which reflects her irritation with Stephen alongside her desire to elegize him.

The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance brings together for the first time a comprehensive collection of extracts from key writings on politics, ideology, and performance. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, and including new writings from leading scholars, the book provides material on: * post-coloniality and performance theory and practice * critical theories and performance * intercultural perspectives * power, politics and the theatre * sexuality in performance * live arts and the media * theatre games. 'A provocative collection of 50 writers ... The extracts are short and well-chosen, and for that alone will be thumbed by student readers.' - Plays International Lizbeth Goodman is at the University of Surrey. She is the author of Contemporary Feminist Theatres (1993), and Feminist Stages (1996) and editor of Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance (1998), and Literature and Gender (1996). Jane de Gay is Research Assistant on the Gender, Politics, Performance Research Project at the Open University. She is the sub-editor of the Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance .

The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance presents the most influential and widely-known, critical work on gender and performing arts, together with exciting and provocative new writings. It provides systematically arranged articles to guide the reader from topic to topic, and specially linked articles by scholars and teachers to explain key issues and put the extracts in context. This comprehensive volume: reviews women's contributions to theatre history includes contributions from many of the top academics in this discipline examines how theatre has represented women over the centuries introduces readers to major theoretical approaches and more complex questions about gender, the body and cross-dressing offers an international perspective, including material from post-apartheid South Africa and post-communist Russia.

This article argues that Graham Swift's novel Last Orders addresses profound moral questions about what constitutes a person. The article takes its lead from John Habgood's question, \"How complete does a human being have to be in order to qualify morally as a person?\" and also draws on insights from other theologians to analyze the moral perspective of the novel. It shows how Last Orders looks for redemption in the face of broken relationships and radical crises of identity, and also shows how Swift defends the moral personhood of the disabled and the recently deceased.

In ‘Why Art Follows Politics’, published in The Daily Worker in 1936, Virginia Woolf remarked on a change in the conditions for creativity in the late 1930s. She wrote that the artist’s studio was now ‘far from being a cloistered spot where he can contemplate his model or his apple in peace’, for it was ‘besieged by voices, all disturbing, some for one reason, some for another.’ She characterised the developing political crisis in terms of auditory disturbance or interruption, including the noises of radio news; the voices of dictators addressing the public by megaphone in the streets, and public opinion, which, Woolf wrote, called for artists to prove their social and political usefulness. In extreme political systems, artists were forced to compromise and use their work for political purposes – to ‘celebrate fascism; celebrate communism’ – in order to be allowed to practise at all.

Virginia Woolf’s engagement with the literary past was at its most urgent and intense in Between the Acts. Written against the backdrop of the escalation of the Fascist threat and the outbreak of the Second World War, a period Woolf feared might signal ‘the complete ruin not only of civilization in Europe, but of our last lap’ (D, V. 162), it betrays a concern to preserve a threatened culture in writing. Set in June 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, the novel encapsulates a form of English society which was about to disappear. Literature is given a prominent place

Katherine Mansfield criticised Night and Day for being old-fashioned on its first publication in 1919, describing it as ‘a novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst of our admiration it makes us feel old and chill: we had never thought to look upon its like again!’¹ As a courtship drama, which reaches a comic conclusion in the engagement of two couples, the novel can be read as conservative not only for following an age-old narrative pattern but also for appearing to endorse the conservative social imperative of marriage. It thus seems to undo the progress made