Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: a wider sphere
- PART ONE CULTURAL CONTEXTS
- 1 Democratic highbrow: Woolf and the classless intellectual
- 2 Woolf, English studies, and the making of the (new) common reader
- PART TWO CRITICAL PRACTICE
- Postscript: intellectual work today
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Woolf, English studies, and the making of the (new) common reader
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: a wider sphere
- PART ONE CULTURAL CONTEXTS
- 1 Democratic highbrow: Woolf and the classless intellectual
- 2 Woolf, English studies, and the making of the (new) common reader
- PART TWO CRITICAL PRACTICE
- Postscript: intellectual work today
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
But why teach English? As you say, all one can do is to herd books into groups, and then these submissive young, who are far too frightened and callow to have a bone in their backs, swallow it down; and tie it up; and thus we get English literature into ABC; one, two, three; and lose all sense of what its about.
Virginia Woolf, Lv:450I was glad to see the C.R. all spotted with readers at the Free Library.
Virginia Woolf, Dv:329BOOKS, PUBLISHING, AND READERS
Reading as a cultural issue in the 1920s and 1930s
If the democratic principle entails a commitment to classless intellectuals, then it also requires that education not be constrained or governed by class. But England in the early twentieth century faced innumerable barriers to the goal of such democratic education. Education had been the domain of a privileged class, and the universities had long been formed by those privileged classes. Verbal, written literacy was arguably at the core of the best education, but reading abilities and cultural literacy levels across the population were low. Mass production was flooding the market with inferior reading materials, while the cost of small-scale printing was soaring, so that quality publication was becoming harder to support. In this context, reading – and, more specifically, the question of how to educate the reader – emerged as one of the most pressing issues of the time.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere , pp. 59 - 114Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003