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BOOK REVIEWS lacking. As its programmatic title suggests, however, the book occasionally stretches a point and paints with a wide brush to make Conrad "one of us," a self-aware postmodern, riven by anxieties, particularly about sexuality, and uncertainly poised in a variety of cultural contexts. He was, however, also "one of them," a late-Victorian gentleman positioned in psychological, ideological, and linguistic spaces, not without resonance for, but certainly removed and even at moments quite remote from "our" own. Not to acknowledge this fully is in the end to underestimate his singular achievement. J. H. Stape ______________ Bangkok, Thailand Woolf & the Essay Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino, eds. Virginia Woolf and the Essay. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 310 pp. $45.00 THE UPSHOT of this work on Virginia Woolf s early career reveals the paradox of an author well known for writing in one genre: what makes the author so widely regarded in one form often obscures her important contributions to another. As a novelist, cultural critic, and essayist , Woolf's extended fictional works have enjoyed a dearth of critical scrutiny throughout much of the twentieth century. This collection of "articles"—the editors clearly distinguish between "essay" as Woolf would have meant it and papers written within an academic discourse on the essay—focuses important critical attention on the often forgotten early career of this celebrated British novelist and innovator as book reviewer and essayist. Academicians and scholars interested in a broad range of subjects —British modernism, women's lives and literature, rhetoric, literacy , epistemology, and reception theory, to name a few—will find much to like here in a text which breaks new ground on a critical and literary icon. Any foray into territory as voluminous, diverse, and uncharted as Woolf's early writing (some 500 articles, the editors inform us) presents its explorers with certain challenges immediately, namely how to take that first foothold for oneself, without even considering how to guide others through circuitous yet fertile new terrain. Wisely and effectively, however, the editors of this collection have focused on five apt and carefully compiled categories that parallel how scholars might place Woolf s early work in not only a twentieth-century context, but in terms of her own canon as well. For example, the three essays making up Part I of this 93 ELT 42 : 1 1999 collection, titled "Woolf and History," place Woolf s earliest reviews and essays against the backdrop of the late Edwardian and early modernist era and their readership. Jeanne Dubino's "Virginia Woolf: From Book Reviewer to Literary Critic, 1904-1918" distinguishes between Woolf s books reviews, sometimes written for money and the approval of editors, and Woolf's personal exploration of form in her essays. Similarly, Eleanor McNees's "Colonizing Virginia Woolf: Scrutiny and Contemporary Cultural Critics" casts Woolf as a social and political reformer in her writing, rather than as an elitist set upon reinscribing traditional, value-laden and privileged definitions of history. To conclude the section , Melba Cuddy-Keane in "Virginia Woolf and the Varieties of Historicist Experience" argues that Woolf s notion of the reading process, hers and others, is inseparable from her own historicist perspective. As the editors anticipated in Part I, new definitions of history fundamentally question an understanding of literary history and the reading process. The relevance of Woolf in these new formulations is the subject of the four essays in Part II: Virginia Woolf and Literary History. While they vary in their focus from Renaissance influences in The Second Common Reader, to Woolf s discussion of the Romantic poets, to comparisons between Woolf and her contemporaries, each seeks to provide new insight into Woolf s position on literary history while she was becoming a part of it. Moreover, the three articles in Part III: Woolf and Reading come together to define for contemporary readers Woolf's theory of reading "somewhat paradoxical in its attempt to codify 'moments of being' and the mood the reader experiences when interacting with a text." And as the authors of the two essays argue in Part IV: Woolf and Genre, the ways in which Woolf continuously attempted to (re)define reading and readers were...

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