THE MODERN AGE - 5^C LINGUISTICO

 

STUDYING VIRGINIA WOOLF - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. She was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Virginia Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. She represents a historical moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. “Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal … With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.”  Read here.

VIRGINIA WOOLF - 5^C LINGUISTICO

 

Virginia Woolf was a well-known English writer in the 20th century. She was best-known for her novels, but she was also a writer of essays, biographies, letters, and diaries. Her writing fell into the Modernist Movement, which was a literary movement that took place between World War I and World War II.

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VIRGINIA WOOLF

 

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”

Virginia Woolf   is recognised as one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century. Perhaps best known as the author of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), she was also a prolific writer of essays, diaries, letters and biographies. Both in style and subject matter, her work captures the fast-changing world in which she was working.

THE MODERN AGE - THE LITERARY CONTEXT

The Modern Age in English literature occupied the years from shortly after the beginning of the 20th century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, whereas in the past they were often heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of cultural shocks.
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VIRGINIA WOOLF AND "MRS DALLOWAY"

"Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life."

Mrs Dalloway 

As Virginia Woolf commented, "In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Furthermore, she hoped to respond to the stagnant state of the novel, with a consciously "modern" novel. Many critics believe she succeeded. The novel was published in 1925, and received much acclaim.

Here and here you can revise Virginia Woolf and her novel.

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S MRS DALLOWAY

Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway was published on 14 May 1925.

It examines one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class Londoner married to a member of Parliament. Mrs. Dalloway is essentially plotless; the action takes place mainly in the characters’ consciousness. The novel addresses the nature of time in personal experience through multiple interwoven stories, particularly that of Clarissa as she prepares for and hosts a party and that of the mentally damaged war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. The two characters can be seen as foils for each other (= they contrast with each other and go well together). Read here.

The Hours  was the working title Virginia Woolf  gave the novel that became Mrs. Dalloway. This novel chronicles the hours that make up one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, who prepares to host a party. Mrs. Dalloway inspired Michael Cunningham's novel, The Hours (1998). In both the earlier and later books, the title refers to the events and thoughts characters experience during the hours in an ordinary day. In a larger sense, the characters are preoccupied by mortality  and suicide becomes the ultimate rejection of a meaningless or too-painful life. 

The Hours is a 2002 psychological drama film directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman.

EXPLORING THE VIRGINIA WOOLF BLOG

This website is a resource for Virginia Woolf fans all over the world. 

The goal of the Virginia Woolf Blog is to celebrate her life and work and give readers a clearer understanding of what she was really like. Using passages from her diaries, letters and various biographies, the blog aims to show readers the real Virginia Woolf, not the tragic figure many people see her as.

VIRGINIA WOOLF - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Embracing formal innovations like stream-of-consciousness and narrative fragmentation, Virginia Woolf’s writing expanded the boundaries of modern fiction, reshaping our ideas about the ability of the novel to represent ordinary life and record swift, historical change. “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall,” she advised, referring to her experimental prose capable of linking the apparently insignificant and immediate facts of daily life (shifts in mood, quotidian interactions, sensations, and judgements) to broader social events (war, patriarchy, technological developments, environmental transformations, and artistic renovations).

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THE MODERN NOVEL

Here you can find a PDF presentation of the Modern novel.

MODERNISM

The Modernist Period in English literature occupied the years from shortly after the beginning of the 20th century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world.

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Click here to read about Modernism.