Reading Modernism's Readers: Virginia Woolf, Psychoanalysis & Bestsellers

About

In early twentieth-century literature, scenes of reading offer a fascinating glimpse at how modernist writers viewed the act of reading itself and understood the challenges posed by modernist texts.

In this session, we will be in conversation with Helen Tyson about her 2024 book, Reading Modernism’s Readers: Virginia Woolf, Psychoanalysis and the Bestseller. Focusing primarily on the works of Virginia Woolf, Tyson explores scenes of reading in Woolf’s novels alongside writings by Marcel Proust, Ethel M. Dell, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Melanie Klein and Marion Milner. She argues that the “staged, fictionalised encounter with literary texts lies at the heart of early twentieth-century culture” and uses this to explore the way that reading is staged in literary modernism, bestselling novels, and psychoanalysis.

In this session, we will discuss psychoanalysis and portraits of the child reader in Woolf, Proust, and Freud; Bestselling romance novels, their readers and the works of Ethel M. Dell; the relationship between reading and redemption in Woolf’s The Waves; Woolf’s The Years, Milner’s An Experiment in Leisure, and the emergence of fascism.