Modernism and the Common Reader: Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Elizabeth Bowen

This dissertation examines literary criticism written by Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West and Elizabeth Bowen. Taking The Common Reader (1925) as a model, I demonstrate an emerging counter-tradition among modernist women critics. These writers developed new critical means of challenging an intellectual and social hierarchy that privileged the work of the professional, and usually male, critic while treating the work of the female essayist as background noise. Combining literary-critical and historical approaches to these essay collections, I consider what it would mean to understand the notion of the common reader, not as a figure of the reader per se, but as the name for a critical method, or an array of methods. Understood in this way, the common reader becomes a framing device represented by shared formal characteristics such as strategic self-effacement, anti-intellectualism, and an impressionistic writing style.