"Partly in Prose": Woolf’s humble Cutbush

Randall, B. (2021) "Partly in Prose": Woolf’s humble Cutbush. Journal of the Short Story in English, 77, pp. 83-103.

Abstract

This article discusses Virginia Woolf’s short fiction “Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville” (1934), unpublished in her lifetime. There are numerous tensions between the elevated and the mundane present in or invoked by this text. It traces the contours of a familiar story contrasting Cutbush’s youthful aspirations with the mundanity of his adult life. Yet it also deliberately plays on the relationship between the elevated genre of poetry, and the humble one of prose: the layout of Woolf’s typescript (the only version of this text extant from Woolf’s lifetime) does not make explicit the genre(s) in which it claims to participate. This contribution explores Woolf’s attempt to “salute” the humble John Cutbush through her experiment with blended genres, while also considering what it means to treat an apparently unfinished text—a humble draft—to meticulous editorial and technical attention.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: Double Issue: Special Section, Humbling Form, and Varia.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Randall, Professor Bryony
• Authors: Randall, B.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Journal Name: Journal of the Short Story in English
• Publisher: Presses universitaires de Rennes
• ISSN: 0294-0442
• ISSN (Online): 1969-6108
• Published Online: 01 December 2023
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2021 Presses universitaires de Rennes
• First Published: First published in Journal of the Short Story in English 77:83-103
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons license