Vincent Sherry
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195178180
- eISBN:
- 9780199788002
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178180.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter situates Virginia Woolf's creative response to the Great War in the deep context of the English Liberalism she knew intimately through her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, who was a dean of ...
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This chapter situates Virginia Woolf's creative response to the Great War in the deep context of the English Liberalism she knew intimately through her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, who was a dean of high Victorian Liberal thought. Where the Liberal government travestied the language of rationalism in its defense of its war policy, Woolf found freedom from the Word of an oppressive patriarchy. Her major development shows in her masterful play with the gestures and postures of logical language. This countermeasure surfaces first in the short stories she wrote during and just after the war, most notably “The Mark on the Wall” and “Solid Objects”. The liberation she enjoyed is witnessed in the new verbal textures of her characteristically modernist novels, most notably Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, where her stylistic experiments are matched with probing accounts of the historical legacy of the war.Less
This chapter situates Virginia Woolf's creative response to the Great War in the deep context of the English Liberalism she knew intimately through her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, who was a dean of high Victorian Liberal thought. Where the Liberal government travestied the language of rationalism in its defense of its war policy, Woolf found freedom from the Word of an oppressive patriarchy. Her major development shows in her masterful play with the gestures and postures of logical language. This countermeasure surfaces first in the short stories she wrote during and just after the war, most notably “The Mark on the Wall” and “Solid Objects”. The liberation she enjoyed is witnessed in the new verbal textures of her characteristically modernist novels, most notably Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, where her stylistic experiments are matched with probing accounts of the historical legacy of the war.
