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Humbling Form

“Partly in Prose”: Woolf’s humble Cutbush

Bryony Randall
p. 83-103

Résumés

Cet article se penche sur une nouvelle de Virginia Woolf qui n’a pas été publiée de son vivant, “Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville” (1934). Ce texte est traversé par des tensions entre le noble et le banal. Il trace les contours d’une histoire familière qui oppose les aspirations de jeunesse de Cutbush et la banalité de sa vie adulte. Mais il joue aussi délibérément sur les relations entre le genre noble de la poésie et le genre humble de la prose : le tapuscrit de Woolf (seule version disponible du texte datant de son vivant) tel qu’il se présente, ne montre pas de manière explicite de quel(s) genre(s) le texte se réclame. Cette contribution explore la façon dont Woolf, en mêlant différents genres, rend hommage à l’humble Cutbush, tout en s’interrogeant sur ce que soumettre un texte inachevé—humble ébauche—à une attention éditoriale et technique soutenue signifie.

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Extrait du texte

Ce document sera publié en ligne en texte intégral en décembre 2023.

Plan

Introducing the “Ode”
The “Odes” We Have
Losing Line Breaks
Louis/Louie

Aperçu du texte

This contribution focuses on a sadly neglected short fiction by Virginia Woolf entitled “Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville.” This short fiction was composed in 1934, but not published until 1985, well after Woolf’s death. The contrast between the title’s lofty tone and its everyday content signals the gentle satire of the piece, in which Woolf makes one of her few, tentative, attempts to enter the interior world of a member of the working class. There are numerous other tensions between the elevated and the mundane present in or invoked by this text: between the protagonist, John Cutbush of Islington, and the poet Byron, to whom he is compared; between a London park and the pagodas of China; between frolicking urban swimmers and the classical subjects of high art; between the butchers of Smithfield and medical surgeons. These tensions are framed by two overarching ones. The first is thematic: the text traces the contours ...

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Référence papier

Bryony Randall, « “Partly in Prose”: Woolf’s humble Cutbush »Journal of the Short Story in English, 77 | 2021, 83-103.

Référence électronique

Bryony Randall, « “Partly in Prose”: Woolf’s humble Cutbush »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 77 | Autumn 2021, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2023, consulté le 02 juin 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3634

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Auteur

Bryony Randall

Bryony Randall is Professor of Modernist Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is co-General Editor of the Cambridge edition of the works of Virginia Woolf; co-volume editor of the Collected Short Fiction for that edition; volume editor on the Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions Project; and author of numerous publications on modernist prose, particularly women’s writing. She is co-director of the Textual Editing Lab at the University of Glasgow, and edited a special issue of Modernist Cultures on the New Modernist Editing (2020), an output of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Network of that name for which she was Principal Investigator.

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