Exploring the Frontiers of Fiction: Humour, Modernism and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf's 'Jacob's Room' (1922)

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Virginia Woolf is not a popular writer. Despite a fierce pride in her work it was never her ambition to be one. Most people have heard of her work, vaguely associating it with the ‘second wave’ of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s and the type of fiction that is commonly called ‘difficult’, and few people unfamiliar with her work would associate her reputation with humour. These are some of the first impressions of a writer who is now hailed by scholars of English literature as one of the icons of modernism. To speak of ‘first impressions’ of Virginia Woolf’s work is not as fatuous as it may seem. After all Woolf’s fiction was initially founded on impressions, and I hope to show that one of the distinctive characteristics of her oeuvre compared to other modernists like T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats or James Joyce, is the intensely visual nature of her art. Furthermore, she is often associated with a movement of modern painting in the early twentieth century known as ‘Post-Impressionism’, including painters like Cézanne, Picasso and Georges Braque. Finally, laughter in all its registers - whether merry, cruel or parodic - runs like a golden thread throughout the texture of her essays, short stories and novels; as satire does more generally throughout modernism. I have chosen Virginia Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), as the focus of my study of Woolf’s modernism. It is not her best known novel, as most critical acclaim is reserved for Mrs. Dalloway (1925) or To the Lighthouse (1927). She started writing fiction in 1915 just as the First World War started and, for four reasons, I believe that Jacob’s Room is the perfect starting point from which to survey Woolf’s particular contribution to the Modernist Movement. Firstly, the social catastrophe associated with the First World War is widely considered to be the decisive historic event in the collective consciousness of early twentieth century Europe, its’ effects reverberating throughout the literary- and visual arts in the 1920s. Secondly, Jacob’s Room was published in a year which falls nicely within the boundaries of the period of High Modernism, which culminated in the decades between 1910 and 1930. Indeed the year of 1922 marks the publication of two other seminal modernist works, T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Thirdly, Jacob’s Room is commonly regarded as Virginia Woolf’s first ‘experimental’ novel in which she, in her own phrase, [...]