Scarica Virginia Woolf - life and novels e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! VIRGINIA WOOLF Virginia Woolf was born in 1882. She grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere; in fact her education consisted of private Greek lessons and access to her father’s library. According to Virginia, water represented two things: on the one hand, it represented what is harmonious and feminine; on the other hand, it stood for the possibility of the resolutions of the intolerable conflicts in death. In 1895 Virginia’s mother died, and this caused her first nervous breakdown: by this moment, she began to be in revolt with her father’s aggressive and tyrannical character. As a matter of fact, only after her father’s death Virginia began her own life and literary career. So, she decided to move to Bloomsbury, where she became a member of the Bloomsbury group, which included the avant-garde writers and artists who rejected the common artistic conventions and morality. Their reputation as radical thinkers was founded on the revolutionary stream-of-consciousness prose style developed by Virginia Woolf, in which the social, political and creative concerns of the coming mid-century were defined as unconventional sexual practices and anti-war socialism. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf and then published her first novel, The Voyage Out. At the same time, she entered a nursing home and attempted suicide by taking drugs. In 1925 the novel Mrs Dalloway appeared, in which Virginia experimented with her new narrative techniques, followed by To the Lighthouse. In 1929, she delivered two lectures which became A room of One’s Own, a work of great impact on the feminist movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, in which she explored many issues connected with women and writing, but she also insisted on the link between economic and artistic independence. In 1929 she began to work on her novel The Waves, in which she recognized the link between her creative process and her illness. However, the broke out of the Second World War increased her anxiety and so she lost her mind: finally, she decided to drown herself in the river Ouse. -A MODERNIST NOVELIST Virginia was interested in giving voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory; so what mattered if the events was the impression they made on the characters who experienced them. In her novels, the omniscient narrator disappeared and the point of view shifted inside the characters’ minds through flashbacks. -WOOLF vs JOYCE As for Joyce, also for Virginia subjective reality came to be identified with the technique called “stream of consciousness”: however, differently from Joyce’s characters, Woolf never lets her characters’ thoughts flow without control, and maintains logical and grammatical organization. As a matter of fact, her technique is based on the fusion of stream of thought into a third-person, past tense narrative. On the other hand, similar to Joyce’s epiphanies are Woolf’s “moments of being”, which are rare moments of insight during the character's’ daily life when they can see reality behind appearance. Moreover, while Joyce was more interested in language experimentation and details, Woolf’s use of words was almost poetic and emotional: in fact, fluidity is the quality of Virginia’s novels.
