Reading Modernism's Readers: Virginia Woolf, Psychoanalysis and the Bestseller

by Helen Tyson

Overview

Reading Modernism’s Readers: Virginia Woolf, Psychoanalysis and the Bestseller examines the scene of reading in modernist, psychoanalytic and popular writing from the early twentieth century. Focusing on the writing of Virginia Woolf, and reading her novels alongside writing by Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Ethel M. Dell, Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, and others, this book challenges our prevailing critical assumptions about modernist reading. Reading Modernism’s Readers argues that the modernist scene of reading reveals some of our culture’s most powerful and enduring fantasies about the role of literature in psychic, social and political life. Reading modernism alongside psychoanalysis and the bestseller, this book aims not only to intervene in debates about modernism, but also to address its legacies in contemporary literature, and in the context of increasingly urgent questions about how—and why—we read today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399522106
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	01/31/2026
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Helen Tyson is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century British Literature at the University of Sussex, where she is also a Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. Helen has published in Textual Practice, Literature Compass, Feminist Modernist Studies, Critical Quarterly, Literary Review and the TLS. She is co-editor of the award-winning collection of essays Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (2021).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Reading Modernism’s Readers

1. Modernism and the Childhood Scene of Reading

2. Strange Taboos and Detrimental Diets: Reading Ethel M. Dell

3. Reading The Waves, Reading You: Virginia Woolf and the Culture of Redemption

4. ‘Monsters within and without,’ or, ‘Forebodings about Fascism’: Marion Milner Reads Virginia Woolf

Conclusion: Reading Modernism’s Readers Today

Editorial Reviews

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?

The Review of English Studies - Kathryn Van Wert

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

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?

TLS - Sophie Oliver