Reading Modernism's Readers

Reviews / Votes

Reading Modernism's Readers [...] uses Woolf to think about the role of literature "in dark times". [...] Helen Tyson's point is that when Woolf wrote scenes of reading in the turbulent 1930s, illuminating the absorbed mind, she was imagining her own reader picking up the book and asking: what do we want? -- Sophie Oliver * TLS * This book offers a substantive account of how modernist aesthetics, political anxieties, and psychoanalytic theory intersect in the figure of the reader, and will be of special interest to scholars of Virginia Woolf and reading theorists. [...] Reading Tyson's work in 2025 in the United States, I am struck by the resonance of modernist ambivalence in my own 'scenes of reading,' and by the continuing relevance of the book's central questions. How might we recognize the fantasies of mastery or submission expressed in our ways of reading or teaching others to read? What might we learn from Woolf and other modernists about the reparative or democratic possibilities of reading in our precarious time? -- Kathryn Van Wert, University of Minnesota Duluth * The Review of English Studies * In this innovative study, Helen Tyson deftly shows how modernism and psychoanalysis respond to the crises of their times by reimagining the intimate psychic processes of reading. Attentive to the political turmoil of the era, Tyson's focus on "scenes of reading" offers fresh and unexpected insight into the historical conjunction of psychoanalysis and modernism. -- Maud Ellmann, University of Chicago