Though acknowledged by literary circles as the first writer to use the stream-of-consciousness technique in her writing, Dorothy Richardson is not as widely recognized as the founder of this style. Her mannerisms and thought processes were affected for the rest of her life by her upbringing in a poverty-stricken family. Brought into the world in 1873, Richardson was destined for stereotypical feminine occupations: a tutor-governess in Hanover and London, a secretary, and an assistant. Her mother’s suicide in 1895 completely broke up the family, only adding to the need for Richardson to find a means of supporting herself. Fortunately, Richardson became involved with the socialists in the area, as well with the people living in Bloomsbury, and soon after she abandoned her secretarial work. She became involved in translations and freelance journalism as an introduction to the bohemian lifestyle; from there she met and married Alan Odel, a much younger man who was somewhat of a cult figure in bohemia at the time, with his waist length hair he wore wrapped around his head.
Throughout her lifetime, Richardson published a large number of essays, short stories, poems, as well as sketches. Most famous is her Pilgrimage series, a thirteen novel project that was the first in literature to employ what Richardson preferred to call “interior monologues.” Pointed Roofs was the first novel in the series and consequentially, the first to introduce such a style of writing. She presented the story with a sense of immediacy, rather than from a retrospective view. Instead of telling narratives in the sense that the realists did, Richardson let the current moment monopolize the literature so that the present could prevail over the past. It...
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Hanscombe, Gillian E. The Art of Life: Dorothy Richardson and the Development of
Feminist Consciousness. Athens: Ohio Universty P, 1983.
Staley, Thomas F. Dorothy Richardson. Boston: Twayne, 1976.
Winning, Joanne. The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson . Wisconsin Press. 21 Mar.
2004 <http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/books/3175.htm>.
Related Links:
Women of the Left Bank
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Modernism: American Salons
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International Review of Modernism
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http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/FINE/juhde/tiess931.htm
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http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/gender.html
The publication history of all of John Clare’s work is, in the end, a history about editorial control and influence. Even An Invite to Eternity, written within the confines of a mental institution seemingly distant from the literary world, is not an exception to this rule, for it and Clare’s other asylum poems do not escape the power and problem of the editor. And, further, this problem of the editor is not one confined to the past, to the actions of Clare’s original publisher John Taylor or to W.F. Knight, the asylum house steward who transcribed the poetry Clare wrote during his 20 odd years of confinement. In fact, debates continue and rankle over the role of the editor in re-presenting Clare’s work to a modern audience: should the modern editor present the unadulterated, raw Clare manuscript or a cleaned up, standardized version as Taylor did? Only exacerbating and exaggerating this problem o...
There were many of artists and writers, who demonstrated symbolism and imagery within their work of art, set in nineteenth century New Mexico. Willa Cather and Georgia O’Keeffe were best known as an author and an artist in the nineteenth century. Willa Cather had a long memorable career writing novels, short stories, poems, and essay, and contributing to any newspapers, editor, and journals as writer. She travels at length to gather material for her narrative and characters, and was recognizable with and respect by many other popular writers in the nineteenth century. In one of her novel, “Death Comes for The Archbishop”, Willa Cather demonstrates her unique ability to show remarkably compound landscapes within delightfully expressive writing. She brilliantly includes symbolism and imagery to express lowest point of emotions that are generally applicable, while artfully portraying the victories or failures of her characters. Georgia O'Keeffe spending most of her summer in New Mexico, delighted by the desolate landscape and extensive atmosphere of the desert, would explore the subject of animal bones in her paintings while she in New Mexico. The flowers, she painted the bones puffed up and captured the stillness and isolation of them, while expressing a sense of beauty that lies within the desert. She explored the symbolize and imagery in her magnified paintings of flowers that attract people emotionally, although her purpose was to express that nature in all its beauty was as powerful as the extensive of the period. As an author, Willa Cather demonstrated a history of New Mexico through her writing. As an artist, Georgia O’Keeffe was using paint and canvas to verify the loveliness scene of New Mexico. Even though, Willa Cather and...
...e insight to life or contain certain meanings that the reader must reconstruct in order to evaluate the text fully. Other novels are considered to be noteworthy because they exist within a specific literary movement, or because they reflect cultural change. However much one might argue that Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre and Chester Himes’ If He Hollers Let Him Go belong at the bottom of the literary ‘stack,’ they nevertheless employ the same concepts and exhibit the same characteristics that turn many other novels into works of ideal greatness.
Williams, Shirley Anne. Forward. Their Eyes Were Watching God. By Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Bantam-Dell, 1937. xv.
Rosenblatt, Roger. “Roger Rosenblatt’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Rpt. in Modern Critical Views of Zora Neale Hurston. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 29-33. Print.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
Although the term "stream of conciousness" is rightly applied to the work of Virginia Woolf, it was first borrowed in 1918 from William James to describe the novels of Dorothy Richardson. Richardson described her work as an attempt to "produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism".
1. c.Robert E. Hemenway, in his Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, University of Illinois Press, 1977, 371 p.
Updike, John. "A&P." The Bedford Introduction To Literature. Ed. Editor's Name(s). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin, 2005.
Perkins, Geroge, and Barbara Perkins. The American Tradition in Literature. 12th ed. Vol. 2. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009. Print
Gilbert, S., Gubar, S. (2000) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press. Dixon, R W (1886) Personal letters.
Sandra Cisneros's writing style in the novel The House on Mango Street transcends two genres, poetry and the short story. The novel is written in a series of poetic vignettes that make it easy to read. These distinguishing attributes are combined to create the backbone of Cisneros's unique style and structure.
Evans, Robert C., Anne C. Little, and Barbara Wiedemann. Short Fiction: A Critical Companion. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 1997. 265-270.
The Bedford Introduction to Literature 4th ed. of the book. Boston: St. Louis St. Martin’s Press, 1996. 883-89.
Throughout her life Virginia Woolf became increasingly interested in the topic of women and fiction, which is highly reflected in her writing. To understand her piece, A Room of One’s Own Room, her reader must understand her. Born in early 1882, Woolf was brought into an extremely literature driven, middle-class family in London. Her father was an editor to a major newspaper company and eventually began his own newspaper business in his later life. While her mother was a typical Victorian house-wife. As a child, Woolf was surrounded by literature. One of her favorite pastimes was listening to her mother read to her. As Woolf grew older, she was educated by her mother, and eventually a tutor. Due to her father’s position, there was always famous writers over the house interacting with the young Virginia and the Woolf’s large house library.