Sentencing Orlando : Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence

The present collection of 16 original essays offers fresh perspectives on Orlando through a unique attention to Woolf’s sentences.

If the line is the privileged semantic unit in verse, we could ask whether the sentence plays the same role in prose. This possibility holds particular relevance for Virginia Woolf''s Orlando: A Biography, which presents an intriguing collage of different sentence styles. The present collection of 16 original essays offers fresh perspectives on Orlando through a unique attention to Woolf''s sentences. By focusing on single sentences in order to address the book''s many interlacing connections between aesthetics and context, it aims to recuperate Orlando as one of Woolf''s most dynamic textual experiments. To what extent does Orlando enact a politics of the sentence? How does Woolf''s manipulation of generic, gendered, sexual and racial boundaries play out on the level of the sentence? These are some of the questions that this timely volume engages. Contributors include: Jane de Gay, Jane Goldman, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Randi Koppen and Steven Putzel.