英美短篇小 说Unit 4 A New Dress.ppt

Unit 4 A New Dress ---- Virginia Woolf Outline About the author Warm-up questions Textual analysis Critical response and impact About the author---Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) Life experience Born and brought up in an upper-middle-class, literary family, and educated at home from the resources of her father’s huge library. Experienced her first bout(发作) of mental illness after her mother’s death and suffered from bipolar(双极的) disorder, mania-depression(躁郁症) illness, for the rest of her life. Moved to the Bloomsbury area of London after her father’s death, and formed the unconventional intellectual and artistic Bloomsbury Group. Began her professional writing life in 1905 Married Leonard Woolf in 1912, a critic and writer on economics, with whom she set up the Hogarth Press in 1917. Drowned herself in the river in 1941, as England entered World War II, and at the verge of another nervous breakdown she feared would be permanent. Bloomsbury Group Their home became a gathering place---Bloomsbury Group. It thrived at the center of the middle-class and upper-middle-class London intelligentsia(知识阶层). The participants include Lytton Strachey (the biographer), J.M. Keynes (the economist), Bertrand Russell (the philosopher), Desmond MacCarthy (the critic), E.M. Foster (the novelist), as well as Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell (an artist). Their intelligence was equaled by their frankness, notably on sexual topic, and the sexual life of Bloomsbury provided ample material for discussion and contributed to Woolf’s freedom of thinking about gender relations. Theme Virginia Woolf grew increasingly concerned with the position of women, especially professional women, and the constrictions under which they suffered. Woolf advocated the creation of literature that would include women’s experience and ways of thinking. She proposed literature that would be “androgynous(兼有男女两性的) in mind” and resonate equally with men and women. Characteristics of writing Virginia Woolf is conside