Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Davis, Thomas S.

Titel

The Historical Novel at History’s End: Virginia Woolf’s The Years

Ist Teil von

• Twentieth century literature, 2014-03, Vol.60 (1), p.1-26

Ort / Verlag

Durham: Duke University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) T he recent surge of interest in late modernism has expanded the purview of modernist studies in at least two directions: on one hand, the study of late modernism addresses lesser known literary and cul- tural activity that may not adhere to the stylistic or periodizing norms of modernism or postmodernism; on the other hand, it draws the late works of household names such as T. S. Eliot, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf from the shadows of their more lauded counterparts from the teens and the twenties.1 Woolf 's late fiction has been a prime focus of this latter direction. [...]Woolf 's concern with everyday life did not begin with this novel, but The Years marks an astonishing departure from the signature interiorized, phenom- enological explorations of her earlier fictions.6 The treatment of everyday life in The Years bears stronger resemblances to historical novels and family chronicles like Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, and John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga than anything one might find in her earlier novels or even in her modernist fellow travelers like Joyce, Proust, or Conrad.7 By attending to Woolf 's reworking of the formal features of the historical novel-plot, event, characterization-we can see The Years registering the protracted decline of a British centered world-system as a crisis of historical consciousness.8 In this late novel, Woolf figures the everyday as the scene where the historical crises of the 1930s attain leg- ibility.