Title: Between the Acts : a step beyond the traditional historical novel
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2009, vol. 35, iss. 1, pp. [77]-85
Extent
[77]-85
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/105125
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
Virginia Woolf's posthumously published novel Between the Acts (1941) dramatizes history as the living past through the framed pageant which mainly offers a condensed history of English Literature. Between the Acts historicizes history by resisting the attractions of the traditional historical novel genre. It grasps history as an ideological process that produces and includes the forces of capitalism, fascism and patriarchy. Woolf attempts to achieve a unified self by reenacting not only the art of the novelist or dramatist but of the historian as well - both in shaping of a comprehensible record of events and also in the critique of explanatory myths and other popular conceptions of the past. This paper reexamines Between the Acts as a late experimental development within the tradition of English historical fiction at a time when writing history convincingly in the established forms was impossible due to the outbreak of a war which was threatening the world.
References
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[5] Deiman, Werner J. (1974) 'History, Pattern, and Continuity in Virginia Woolf'. Contemporary Literature. Vol. 15 No. 1, 49–66. | DOI 10.2307/1207709
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[9] Lukàcs, Georg (1982) The Historical Novel. London: Merlin Press.
[10] Mc Whirter, David (1993) 'The Novel, the Play, and the Book: Between the Acts and the Tragicomedy of History'. EHL, Vol. 60 No. 3, 787–812.
[11] Wesseling, Elizabeth (1991) Writing History as a Prophet. Amsterdam: John Benjamin's Public Company.
[12] Woolf, Virginia (1961) The Death of the Moth & Other Essays. Baltimore: Penguin Books.
[13] Woolf, Virginia (1966) Collected Essays. Leonard Woolf (ed.). London: Hogarth Press.
[14] Woolf, Virginia (1967) A Room of One's Own. London: Hogarth Press.
[15] Woolf, Virginia (1968) Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press.
[16] Woolf, Virginia (1977[1938]) Diary. Anne Olivier Bell, and Andrew Mc Neillie (eds.). London: Hogarth Press.
[17] Woolf, Virginia (1984[1941]) Between the Acts. London: Granada Publishing Limited.
[18] Woolf, Virginia (2004) To the Lighthouse. London: Wordsworth Classics.