Woolf & The War

BOOK REVIEWS These few examples should suffice to suggest that there is an abundance of material for further research in Clark's edition. The editor himself anticipates possible approaches in his introduction. To be sure, the introduction serves the customary bio-bibliographical demands of the Cornell Yeats series, i.e. it explains the nature, order, and arrangement of the material. Clark relates the development of the manuscripts to important events in Yeats's life. But he goes a little further, in noticeable disregard of the guidelines laid down by the editorial board of the series, which stipulate that the "emphasis throughout will be on the documents themselves, and critical analysis will be limited to discussion of their significance in relation to the published texts." Clark singles out two poems that, to him, are seminal works in establishing the overall meaning of the entire collection, "At Algeciras" and "Mohini Chattejee," and discusses them at some length with the help of the final, published versions , which are quoted in their entirety. Especially the latter poem receives detailed treatment as "the springboard from which Yeats launched himself into 'Words for Music Perhaps.'" What Clark's introduction does not offer, however, is an explanation of his editorial philosophy. Other editors of the Cornell Yeats series, George Bornstein in particular, have grasped the opportunity to align themselves with recent, postmodernist developments in editorial theory . Clark is silent about these things, indicating thereby that he will have nothing to do with them. Working with the manuscripts in order to establish their place in Yeats's biography and poetic oeuvre carries its own justification. K. P. S. Jochum Universität Bamberg Woolf & The War Karen Levenback. Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. xvi + 208 pp. $34.95 VIRGINIA WOOLF'S WRITING reflects the deep and lasting impact of World War I on both British combatants at the front and civilians at home. Karen Levenback's Virginia Woolf and the Great War offers an important exploration of the extent to which the First World War shaped Woolf 's "war consciousness," her narrative art, and the social and political content of her fiction and essays. The study theorizes the process by which the Great War became reconfigured through individual memory, the popular press, official war histories, and what Levenback calls "the 231 ELT 44:2 2001 popular consciousness." Through readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway , To the Lighthouse, The Years, and Between the Acts, she locates crucial gaps between Woolf 's own war memories and the "constructions of the Great War" through which Woolf linked the civilian experience with that of combatants returning from the front. These novels in particular are fraught with Woolf 's observation and memory of war death like that suffered by the character Jacob Flanders; or the glorification of death like that which sells Mr. Carmichael's poetry; of victims of shell-shock and survival guilt like Septimus Smith; or the false sense of civilian immunity that Peter Walsh exhibits; and of the realities of civilian casualties resulting from bombing as suggested in The Years. Woolf challenged the social constructions of the war, particularly the British endorsement of a false masculine history of war and war heroism . Rupert Brooke's death in April 1915, for instance, was exploited in patriotic support of the war. His death, which occurred during a visit to Egypt while en route to Gallipoli, most likely resulted from sunstroke, dysentery and an insect bite, but was hailed in the Times obituary as "a young life full of promise and joyfully laid down." Woolf, who counted herself a close colleague to Brooke, was appalled at the propagandistic uses of the incident. News coverage of the Great War not only prohibited civilians from learning the realities of the front and glossed over the horrors of trench warfare, but, as Woolf 's novels reveal, also perpetuated certain myths of war. As Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich and Susan Squier have shown in Arms and the Woman, Woolf exposed the construction of war as the purview solely of male combatants. Levenback adds to this point that Woolf 's narrative style exposed other myths of the war such as civilian immunity. Specifically...