Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gotze, Leopold

Titel

This Room Explains a Great Deal: Virginia Woolfs Renovative Modern Fiction of the 1920s

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This thesis examines how Virginia Woolf realises her vision for what she called a‘modern fiction’ over the course of the 1920s. Late twentieth-century scholars have discussed this stage of Woolf-ian aesthetics in a variety of political and aesthetic contexts and recent readings have turned to integrated and cross-disciplinary approaches, establishing modern fiction’s historicity and dialogic intent. This study contributes to advances in time- and space-conscious modernist studies of Woolf,examining the influence of the gendered, domestic, and public spaces of turn-of-the century England on Woolf’s modernist writing.As a cultural observer of Victorian and Edwardian social structures, Woolf synthesises her personal experiences of both traditional and modern life to create anew literature, capable of capturing the modern individual, as she perceives her/him,in relation to the complex cultural shifts of the period. Woolf’s somewhat conservative modernist aesthetic means that she draws from both pre-existing and new social and literary practices ― Woolf’s modernist techniques mean that she is, in effect, are novator of established literary forms.The chapters of this thesis are arranged via three milestone novels in Woolf’s development of a “modern fiction”. Each reading of the novels unpacks a specificnarrative strategy, as Woolf moves towards a fulfilment of the ideas outlined in heres say ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919). The first chapter explores Jacob’s Room (1922) as Woolf’s critique of Edwardian culture, through the spatial politics of private and publicinstitutions which Woolf derived from growing up in a suffocating Victorian home. Mrs Dalloway (1925) mends the cracked relationship of the fragmented individual in as hattered post-war society by adapting a post-impressionist sense of order and self-3c ompletion rooted in rhythmic composition. Orlando (1928), through the layering and satirising of past and present literature, which Woolf filters through developments in modernist parody and biography, marks Woolf’s outgrowing of the novel form which,in turn, enables Woolf’s experimental fiction of the 1930s until the end of her life.