Maggie Humm – Snapshots

Brings together Maggie Humm's pioneering work on feminist literary criticism, Virginia Woolf, film and visual cultures

• Explores a range of critical approaches to Woolf’s writings including modernism, psychoanalysis, French feminist theory, and postmodernism
• A survey and analysis of feminist criticism from the 1970s
• An historical account of UK women’s writing from 1900 to the present

This book principally coheres around a sense of women’s writing as inseparable from its cultural production. The multi-faceted essays here reveal how feminist criticism changed in one academic’s career from 1986 from the publication of her stellar work, Feminist Criticism. Snapshots discusses theories including ‘the anxiety of influence’, écriture feminine, postmodernism, life-writing all informed by a belief that subjectivity and creativity are integral to non-fiction writing. At the centre of these discussions is the work of Virginia Woolf, whose reputation and scholarly status are unique. The book maps Humm's writing on feminism, visual culture and twentieth-century women’s writing across forty transformative years of criticism.

Readers and scholars will benefit from the book’s historical and theoretical range, as well as its autobiographical fragments. It demonstrates how feminists try always to be critically innovative, and the ways in which Maggie Humm's work has opened up new avenues into twentieth-century women’s writing, film and feminist criticism.