VIRGINIA WOOLF - A BRIEF GLANCE ON HER LIFE, WORKS AND STYLE.

INTRODUCTION "stream of consciousness"(CC BY-SA 2.0) by planeta To the Lighthouse is not an easy novel to read. Its style of writing is quite critical. Readers can get confused because there are none of the standard novelistic signposts telling the readers what is the location, where the action is being done. who is speaking, when this takes place. For example the novel begins with the answer to a question that has not been asked, and that question is answered by the person who has not been described, and addressed to a child who seems to be sitting on the floor in an unspecified location. Every single thing is ambiguous. Nor is there much respect for the standard novelistic conventions of clock time or consecutive action. Woolf seems to delight in confusing the readers by using and inserting a recollection or anticipating a reaction, consequently past and present and future seem to flow into one another in an unbroken stream of consciousness. STREAM OF CONSCI...

INTRODUCTION The stream of consciousness is a narrative technique on which so many writers have given their views whether they are essayist, novelists etc, but the most well known is Virginia Woolf who is considered as the forerunner of this style of writing. "Influenced by the works of French writer Marcel Proust and Irish writer James Joyce, among others, Woolf strove to create a literary form that would convey inner life. To this end, she elaborated a technique known as stream of consciousness"  (Bouzid) Richardson is the pioneer of the stream of consciousness technique. He is the first 20th century British author to publish a full length stream of consciousness novel Pointed Roofs. On one side was the little grey river, on the other long wet grass repelling and depressing. Not far ahead was the roadway which led, she supposed to the farm where they were to drink new milk. She would have to walk with someone when they came on the road, and talk. She wond...

There are various psychological as well as literary techniques used by Virginia Woolf in her novels. This post will help to understand them in brief. STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS The novels based on stream of consciousness are the peculiar product of the 20th century. The rise of this art form on the eve of the World War I marks an epoch in the history of English novel. This particular kind of novel is also called the novel of subjectivity or the psychological novel.  The phrase Stream of Consciousness was first used by William James in his Principles of Psychology 1890 , to denote the chaotic flow impressions and sensations through the human consciousness, Dorothy Richardson in England, James Joyce in Ireland, and Proust in France. The chief architects of the novel of subjectivity, and Virginia Woolf is the novelist who imparted from and discipline to it and thus made it in popularly accepted art – form. Woolf is not the founder of the stream of consciousness technique, ...

VIRGINIA’S TASTE TOWARDS THE LITERARY TECHNIQUES. Virginia’s theory of fiction is totally different from that of Fielding, Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, or Hardy etc. Fielding defined fiction as a comic epic in prose, Scott made it a means for the reproduction of history and romance. Whereas for Jane Austen it was just a medium of expressing life’s little experiences, a storm in a tea - cup. Dickens regarded it as a chronicle of social history and a picture gallery of caricatures and characters. Hardy sought through it an expression of the tragic, the fatal and the pessimistic with Hardy again plot and character were of primary importance. It was the misfortune of Virginia that she was born in an age which was so prosaic. Had she been in an age of poetry she would have been a great poet. As a prose writer too she belongs to the tradition of those who have enriched English literature by writing poetic prose. She is however, a poet without the proper apparatus and equipm...

"Virginia Woolf Wallpaper"(CC BY 2.0) by lushka1 Descending from the intellectual aristocracy, Woolf is one of the most noteworthy novelists of the twentieth century. She was the one who tried to give a new direction to the English novel with a new spiritual awareness.  She was a novelist of distinction and an artist who whatever her dependence upon tradition had something original to say and who surpassed most of her contemporaries in sensitive fidelity to the most evanescent moments of conscious. Virginia’s style of writing has invented something new which takes a break from tradition and conventional conceptions of the novel; she entirely rejected and replaced all the old notions of writings. She gave more emphasis on incident, external description, and straight forward narrative by an overriding concern with the character presentation by the Stream of consciousness method. The way Proust introduced something new into French fiction, likewise Virginia Woolf d...