Virginia Woolf S Mythic Method

Reinvigorates modernist analysis of myth in Virginia Woolf's fiction by illuminating Woolf's use of parataxis to engage both myth and contemporary social and political issues.

Comprehensive study by leading scholars of Virginia Woolf and her novels, letters, diaries and essays.

Tracing the developing modernist aesthetic in the thought and writings of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, Deborah Parsons considers the cultural, social and personal influences upon the three writers. Exploring the connections between their theories, Parsons pays particular attention to their work on: forms of realism characters and consciousness gender and the novel time and history. An understanding of these three thinkers is fundamental to a grasp on modernism, making this an indispensable guide for students of modernist thought. It is also essential reading for those who wish to understand debates about the genre of the novel or the nature of literary expression, which were given a new impetus by the pioneering figures of Joyce, Richardson and Woolf.

These days, we are ever more often confronted by overwhelming events. Searching for a way to understand them, we turn to mythic archetypes still present in our culture. The authors of these essays pose questions about the reliability of the archetypes found in tradition, history, and scattered mythologemes. The essays in this collection deal with the presence of mythic time in modern speculative fiction, such as fantasy and alternate histories, and discuss major mythologemes and their functions in popular literature and extra-literary reality. The authors show how mythopoeic fiction becomes a (genetically) modified mythic mirror in which we hope to see answers to vexing questions, or just a reality superior to the ordinary one. In the Mirror of the Past: Of Fantasy and History is a collection of seven essays by American and Polish authors, including Brian Attebery, Terri Doughty, and Marek Oziewicz, with Mircea Eliade’s concept of “return from history to History” as their underlying theme.

This book analyses the representation of the past and the practice of historiography in the fiction and critical writings of Virginia Woolf, and draws parallels between Woolf's historiographical imagination and the thought of Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher of history and key theorist of modernity.

Virginia Woolf's discovery as a novelist—how to convey the inner reality of experience—is set forth for the first time by Harvena Richter. A voyage "inward" to Mrs. Woolf's subjective methods, Miss Richter's study furthers our understanding of her novels, especially The Waves and The Years, and reveals a new, vital, completely contemporary Virginia Woolf. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1.0, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Institut für fremdsprachliche Philologien), language: English, abstract: Virginia Woolf took her life in March 1941. Her fear that she would no longer be able to live meaningfully, according to her ideals and particular vision of life, forced her to choose death as salvation. To her, death was not an ending. The spirit above all had to be preserved. Like her character Septimus Warren Smith, under the strain of mental illness, she threw her life away in order to preserve that which was most sacred to her – life and integrity of the soul. Probably it seems to be a contradiction - to destroy one’s life in an effort to save it. There are many such paradoxes in Virginia Woolf’s thinking, due to her emotional nature and to her special way of looking at life, time, and space that shapes reality itself. In this vision of life as an eternal process, the concepts of time and space, invented by man, have no meaning, because reality exists outside of them. By passing his temporal life man views all things in relation to himself and his life on the earth. But it is rather difficult to squeeze one’s life among birth and death, for man permanently organises his experience into rather relative formulations of interweaving time and space. And reality, as viewed by Virginia Woolf, includes the whole expanse of space and time, and every living form brings its historic and prehistoric past into the ever-flowing stream of life. The present moment is never isolated, because it is filled with very preceding moment, and is constantly in the process of change. Time flows with the stream, having neither beginning nor end. Reality is actually timeless and spaceless, because it contains all space and all time. Believing in the eternal process, Virginia Woolf also demanded a revolution in literary technique and subject matter. She reconsidered personality, language, plot and structure in a new light. Personality was continuously in the process of taking shape and could not be accomplished by external descriptions. Language had to convey the emotions and perceptions of different levels of awareness all at the same moment, revealing the unconscious as well as the conscious things. Plot had to be eliminated, since action held no interest. The only thing that mattered was the inner life. Filled with the “moments of being”, it revealed to a person the pattern behind the woolly curtain of existence and through it, connected him to the other people and the outer world.