« Je » et « nous » : quatre essais de Virginia Woolf sur l’essai comme genre

Abstract

In France, Great Britain and the US, the renewed interest in Virginia Woolf’s essays is indissociable from the critical revaluation and re-mapping of modernism, whether this implies forms of redefinition or recontextualization. To reassess Woolf’s essays thus entails the discovery of their historicist, pragmatic and political dimension. In “The Decay of Essay Writing”, “A Book of Essays”, “The Modern Essay” and “Montaigne”, Woolf’s own critical work consists in defining the generic value of the essay, in discussing its position on the literary stage while suggesting that its democratic value is anchored in the specific relationship it creates between the speaking “I”and the reading “we”.

Keywords

• V. Woolf
• the common
• conversation
• democracy
• essay
• genre