“문학은 공동의 땅입니다” —현대출판문화와 버지니아 울프, 에세이스트

초록

“Literature is Common Ground”: Virginia Woolf as an Essayist in the Age of Modern Print Culture Abstract YoungjooKim Starting with “‘The Son of Royal Langbirth’” in 1904 and concluding with “Mrs. Thrale” in 1941, Virginia Woolf wrote literary journalism over the course of her career. In her reviews and articles in periodicals as well as in her novels and essays, she expressed her uneasy feelings and thoughts on the increasing commodification of print culture, the practices of editors and publishers, and journalistic professionalism of her time. While she appreciated the genre of the essay as she contributed reviews and essays to both mainstream liberal and highbrow publications and mass-circulating women’s magazines, Woolf also elaborated a strong critique on the popular essayists’ profession as well as the mass-readership of modern print culture. This paper aims to examine Woolf’s attitudes as a professional essayist toward mass print culture, toward the aesthetics and politics of the essay form in literary marketplace, and above all, toward the relationships between the writer and the reader. Resituating her essaystic practice in the context of the writers’ battles on browism in the 1920s and 30s emphasizes Woolf’s continuous engagement in intellectual contentions of the time and foregrounds her concept of the common reader that creates a democratic mode of literacy in which reading, thinking and writing take place both in private and public spheres.

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