Editing Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Woolf and the Royal Academy

In this book chapter originally presented as a paper at the 18th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, June 19-22 2008 held by the University of Denver, Professor Humm discusses Virginia Woolf’s review of the Royal Academy 1919 summer exhibition “The Royal Academy,” in which she obscures the contribution of women artists as well as the significant date of the exhibition which was the first since the end of the war. Woolf’s review together with the 1919 exhibition itself, raises gender and political issues and presents a crucial case study of ambiguities in Woolf’s writings as well as in contemporary critical difficulties with “modernism” itself