Sentencing Orlando

Abstract

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 many different sentence styles. This collection of sixteen original essays by international Woolf and modernist scholars is the first dedicated exclusively to Orlando. It offers fresh perspectives on Woolf’s text, and presents original critical discoveries via a sentence-based mode of literary analysis. Through a unique attention to Woolf’s sentences, it aims to recuperate this text as one of Woolf’s most dynamic modernist experiments. Focusing on single sentences in order to address Orlando’s many interlacing connections between aesthetics and contexts, the contributors address questions such as: 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? The contributors highlight Orlando’s rich allusions to other literary works as well as the cultural and political contextual webs woven by its modes of satire, parody, and pastiche. Attending to Woolf’s syntactic manipulations that unsettle the boundaries of the sentence, this volume both performs intricate literary analyses of her poetic language, and examines the social, political and cultural loads carried by the sentences in Orlando.