How Should One Read “The Reader”? New Approaches to Virginia Woolf’s Late Archive
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Abstract
In the final months of her life, Virginia Woolf worked on two projects. One was the posthumously published novel Between the Acts (1941). The other was a literary-historical project, which she provisionally titled “Turning the Page” or “Reading at Random”, but which is now known by the dual titles “Anon” and “The Reader”. Although published in a 1979 eclectic edition, these documents have received little critical attention. This article proposes three novel approaches to this archive of documents. The first takes up the methodology proposed by Woolf’s original titles and reads a single folio of this project at random, paying close material attention to what is on both sides of Woolf’s typescript page. The second approach expands on the materialist slant of the first approach and offers an anatomy of this archive, while the third approach expands on my previous discussion of cataloging and classification, in order to sketch out a historiography of Woolf’s late archive.
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