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Chapter 5 - Uncanny Empathy

Woolf’s Half-Life of Objects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2019

Eve C. Sorum
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Boston
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Summary

In “ Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf condemns the Edwardians H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy as “materialists” who “spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.” 1 Here, as well as in other essays such as “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” she emphasizes the misguided attention that the Edwardians give to the material world, whether it emerges in Galsworthy’s transformation of a character into a material object (Mrs. Brown, in Woolf’s anecdote, would become in Galsworthy’s story simply “a pot broken on the wheel and thrown into the corner”), or in Bennett’s exhaustive consideration of every element of the setting, where he “would observe every detail with immense care,” from the advertisements to Mrs. Brown’s gloves. 2 In contrast, she writes, modern writers are interested in and strive to write about “the dark places of psychology” (“Modern Fiction,” 162).

Type
Chapter
Information
Modernist Empathy
Geography, Elegy, and the Uncanny
, pp. 142 - 173
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Uncanny Empathy
  • Eve C. Sorum, University of Massachusetts, Boston
  • Book: Modernist Empathy
  • Online publication: 11 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595667.005
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  • Uncanny Empathy
  • Eve C. Sorum, University of Massachusetts, Boston
  • Book: Modernist Empathy
  • Online publication: 11 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595667.005
Available formats
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  • Uncanny Empathy
  • Eve C. Sorum, University of Massachusetts, Boston
  • Book: Modernist Empathy
  • Online publication: 11 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595667.005
Available formats
×