ABSTRACT
Both of these passages concern Nick Greene-the character in Orlando through which Woolf imagines the novel’s various, historical literary marketplaces-from Renaissance patronage to the eighteenth-century Scriblerian scene to Woolf’s present. While Greene is a comic character, Woolf uses him to rehearse serious concerns about institutions of the cultural marketplace and their effect on writers and readers. The fi rst quotation dramatizes a disabling self-consciousness that comes upon the writer when she reads the criticism of literary journalists. The second holds the institutions of literary marketing and evaluation-publishing, networking, reviewing, awards-at arm’s length, fi guring them as hostile (or at best irrelevant) to the pleasure and feeling of writing, fi gured, by comparison, as private, secret, and intimate.
