Staff Pick
Anyone who's read and loved Woolf's more popular work would be remiss not to seek out The Waves, and anyone who has yet to discover her work would do well to start with this highly poetic and wonderfully experimental novel told from various points of view over the course of its characters' lives. If you're the kind of reader who has to underline beautiful sentences, you might want to sharpen your pencil — you'll be savoring paragraph after glorious paragraph. Recommended By Darla M., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
"Clear, bright, burnished, at once marvelously accurate and subtly connotative. The pure, delicate sensibility found in this language and the moods it expresses are a true kind of poetry."
The New York TimesThe Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, standing with those few works of twentieth-century literature that have created unique forms of their own. In deeply poetic prose, Woolf traces the lives of six people from infancy to death as they fleetingly unite around the unseen figure of a seventh, Percival. Allusive and mysterious, The Waves yields new treasures upon each reading.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel. The author of numerous novels, collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.
Mark Hussey, general editor of Harcourt's annotated Woolf series, is professor of English at Pace University in New York City and editor of the Woolf Studies Annual.
Molly Hite is professor of English at Cornell University. She is the author of Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative, and two novels, Class Porn and Breach of Immunity. She has written articles on postmodernist and modernist fiction, feminist theory and practice, and academic culture.
Synopsis
The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, standing with those few works of twentieth-century literature that have created unique forms of their own. In deeply poetic prose, Woolf traces the lives of six children from infancy to death who fleetingly unite around the unseen figure of a seventh child, Percival. Allusive and mysterious,
The Waves yields new treasures upon each reading.
Annotated and with an introduction by Molly Hite
About the Author
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel. The author of numerous novels, collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.
Mark Hussey, general editor of Harcourt's new annotated Woolf series, is professor of English and women's and gender studies, and editor of the Woolf Studies Annual, at Pace University. He lives in Upper Nyack, New York.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface: Virginia Woolf
Chronology
Introduction
The Waves
Notes to The Waves
Suggestions for Further Reading:
Virginia Woolf
Suggestions for Further Reading:
The Waves