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

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...