Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: From Michel de Montaigne to the New Media: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Twenty-First Century
- Part I ‘Theorising’ Reading, ‘Theorising’ Language
- Part II The Politics of Writing
- Part III Dialogue and Dissent
- 5 Thinking and Talking/War and Peace
- 6 Virginia Woolf, ‘Patriotism’, and ‘our prostituted fact purveyors’
- Conclusion: ‘Thinking Against the Current’
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Virginia Woolf, ‘Patriotism’, and ‘our prostituted fact purveyors’
from Part III - Dialogue and Dissent
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: From Michel de Montaigne to the New Media: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Twenty-First Century
- Part I ‘Theorising’ Reading, ‘Theorising’ Language
- Part II The Politics of Writing
- Part III Dialogue and Dissent
- 5 Thinking and Talking/War and Peace
- 6 Virginia Woolf, ‘Patriotism’, and ‘our prostituted fact purveyors’
- Conclusion: ‘Thinking Against the Current’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Is it not possible that if we knew the truth about war, the glory of war would be scotched and crushed where it lies curled up in the rotten cabbage leaves of our prostituted fact-purveyors …?
Virginia Woolf, Three GuineasPatriotism and its results – wars – give an enormous revenue to the newspaper trade, and profits to many other trades.
Leo Tolstoy, ‘Patriotism and Government’The narrowest patriotism could be made to appear noble, the foulest accusations could be represented as an indignant outburst of humanitarianism, and the meanest and most vindictive aims falsely disguised as idealism. Everything was legitimate which could make the soldiers go on fighting.
Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World WarIn her 1916 letter to Margaret Davies, Virginia Woolf expressed her feelings regarding World War I: ‘I become steadily more feminist, owing to the Times, which I read at breakfast and wonder how this preposterous masculine fiction [the war] keeps going a day longer … Do you see any sense in it?’ (II2 76). Woolf's question is still with us today, as we struggle, in this age of ‘information’, with our expanded media: newspapers, magazines, television, radio and Internet ‘blog’ sites. How did the United States – with major support from Great Britain – undertake this unfathomable pre-emptive war in Iraq?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language , pp. 97 - 112Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010