Reading Modernism’s Readers: Virginia Woolf, Psychoanalysis and the Bestseller

Reading Modernism’s Readers: Virginia Woolf, Psychoanalysis and the Bestseller examines the scene of reading in modernist, psychoanalytic and popular writing from the early twentieth century. Focusing on the writing of Virginia Woolf, and reading her novels alongside writing by Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Ethel M. Dell, Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, and others, this book challenges our prevailing critical assumptions about modernist reading. Reading Modernism’s Readers argues that the modernist scene of reading reveals some of our culture’s most powerful and enduring fantasies about the role of literature in psychic, social and political life. Reading modernism alongside psychoanalysis and the bestseller, this book aims not only to intervene in debates about modernism, but also to address its legacies in contemporary literature, and in the context of increasingly urgent questions about how--and why--we read today.

Helen Tyson is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century British Literature at the University of Sussex, where she is also a Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. Helen has published in Textual Practice, Literature Compass, Feminist Modernist Studies, Critical Quarterly, Literary Review and the TLS. She is co-editor of the award-winning collection of essays Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (2021).