Virginia Woolf has for many years been seen as a key participant in
British literary modernism. Following a period of relative critical
neglect following her tragic death in 1941, her body of work has
earned her recognition as a groundbreaking feminist thinker, a
perceptive literary critic, a formidably creative diarist and
correspondent, and as one of the twentieth century's leading
essayists. Most notably, her experimental fiction, from her first
novel The Voyage Out to the posthumously published Between the
Acts, has grown in both popularity and critical renown. All of her
work remains in print, and novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the
Lighthouse, and Jacob's Room are regularly read and discussed both
inside and outside the academy. Few modernist writers--indeed, few
writers of any period-have had such a pronounced and lasting impact
on literary culture. There has been, and continues to be, an
enormous amount of critical and scholarly work done on almost all
aspects of Woolf's writing and life. Monographs, journal articles,
and collections of essays dedicated to Woolf's writing appear every
year alongside scholarly and popular biographies, and there is an
annual international conference dedicated solely to her work. Yet
amidst this veritable inundation of exegetical energy, this
tremendous and ever-growing body of scholarly work on Woolf, there
is one curious omission. While Woolf was both in theory and
practice fascinated by questions of character and characterization,
scholarship has not generally been directed towards this field.
This may be due to both general theoretical discomfort with the
critical category of character, and to a sense that Woolf's work in
particular may not respond well to such interpretations. However,
Woolf was very much an experimenter in character, and readings that
minimize or ignore this interest miss an important facet of her
work. This book offers the first full-length reading of Virginia
Woolf's career-long experimentation in character. It examines her
early journalism, from her short reviews of contemporary literature
to more substantial essays on Gissing and Dostoyevsky, for
indications of her engagement with questions of characterization,
and links this interest to her later fictional writings. In The
Voyage Out she establishes a continuum of levels of
characterization, a key element of which is the Theophrastan type,
an alternative form of characterization that corresponds to a way
of knowing real people, while in Jacob's Room she seeks to
represent an elusive 'essence' that may exist outside of the
structuring forms of social life, and which is accessible through
speculative identification. Mrs Dalloway explores the shaping of
character through social pressure, and To the Lighthouse proposes a
simplified version of character as an ethically acceptable way of
relating to other people. A similar notion is picked up in The
Waves, in which a limited character, or form of caricature, is
proposed as a possible solution to the problems of
characterization. In Between the Acts, many of these themes
reappear as Woolf simultaneously situates her characters more
firmly than ever in a comprehensible physical and social context,
and explores areas where language and rationality fail. Virginia
Woolf: Experiments in Character is an important book for Woolf
studies in particular, modernism studies more generally, and
literature collections.
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