Virginia Woolf, The Waves

James Stewart (University of Dundee)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.08: English Writing and Culture of the early Twentieth Century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Chris Baldick (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Peter Childs (Newman University), Louise McDonald (Newman University)

Dates

First circulation or publication Oct 1931

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

The Waves (1931) is Virginia Woolf's most experimental and saturated piece of writing. During the process of composition its self-awareness was prefigural. That is to say, its production of sound, figure, and language were ahead of the author's conscious intention to the extent that she was – famously – obliged to go stumbling after her own seemingly autonomous voice. In one sense, then, The Waves obviously represents a high-Modernist breaking and remaking of novelistic form. But in another sense it is really the acme of a certain kind of rhetoric in which Woolf was long practised and in which she had achieved great facility; and it takes that sort of fluency about as far as Woolf would have wished to go.

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1427 words

Citation: Stewart, James. "The Waves". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 July 2002 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8106, accessed 26 November 2024.]

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