Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

inform her moulding of new literary forms. Ben Harvey also takes up Woolf’s interest in
the space of the gallery in his study of her essay “Pictures and Portraits,” turning however
to her institutional critique of the cultural and ideological forces that permeate its walls
and delimit “which objects and which people make it into an art gallery.”
Th e two fi nal essays of this volume, by Maggie Humm and Elisa Sparks, demonstrate
the rewarding attention being paid in Woolf scholarship to the substantial collection of
photographs within the Stephen family archives. Humm investigates how we can approach
domestic photograph albums like those of the Woolfs and of Vanessa Bell through
a Foucault-inspired process of “reading” that attends to the syntax, “codes and indices” of
amateur photography. Humm’s contribution to the emerging theory of such photography
attends to the Bloomsbury albums as a form of autobiographical narrative, discussing
such things as layout and chronology, as well as forms of spatial patterning within individual
images. Sparks extends this focus to the role of scraps within Victorian albums, in
order to think about the scraps and fragments with which Woolf metaphorically collaged
her own memories of family life at Talland House in To the Lighthouse as an experiment in
“transforming visual methodologies to writing,” by which the novel becomes “a copious
family album, fi lled with photographs, personal writing, quotations from favorite poems,
and bright colored scraps commemorating famous people and events.”
As well as the papers represented by the above sample, fi ve plenary speakers addressed
the conference, beginning with Victoria Glendinning who previewed her biography Leonard
Woolf: a Life (published in September 2006), which was followed by a conversation
with Paul Levy focussing on Leonard’s Jewishness and Bloomsbury responses to this. Th e
second plenary was an illustrated talk by Christopher Reed on British Vogue in the 1920s
and Woolf’s connections with the magazine, and more specifi cally on the Vogue aesthetic
as a context for Woolf’s Orlando. Th e third and fourth plenary speakers were Ruth Gruber
and Lisa Williams respectively, who outlined a more personal response to Woolf in terms
of the former’s reminiscences of her and the latter’s fi ctional letters written to Woolf. Th e
titles of these plenary talks are given at the end of this volume in the Conference Program,
and the material presented derives from works already in print or soon to be published
elsewhere. Melba Cuddy-Keane drew the threads of the conference together in her concluding
plenary, which also serves as the fi tting conclusion to this volume, and among
much else reminds us of the provisionality of Woolf’s fi ctional endings in her commitment
to the ongoing journey, which leads the editors of the present volume to wish all
success to the organisers of the 17 th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf
at the Miami University of Ohio, due to take place in June 2007 as these Selected Papers
appear. Th e editors would also like to thank Wayne Chapman and his team at Clemson
University for their exemplary care in preparing this volume for publication, and Annabel
Cole for permission to reproduce the painting by Roger Fry on the volume cover.
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