The Study On Virginia Woolf’s Literary Style

The literary style is meaningful form. As a writer and critic, Virginia Woolf hadnever given up for the thinking of the changes of literary style; her whole life waslooking for "new form". Consequently, it was important for us to comprehend hernovels, biographies and criticisms, from her writing and critical thoughts.This thesis is divided into five parts:The introduction has primarily combed the researches of Virginia Woolf, thedefinition of literary style and explains why I chose this subject.Chapter1: discusses the concept of Woolf’s novel style and characteristics of herstream of consciousness novels. Woolf considered that the core of novel lied indescribing human nature and expressed the complicated life.This living world is notonly the physical world, but also the spiritual world. Perspective of human nature wasnot only an external action, but also inherent ideologies. So Woolf was different fromthe traditional novelist who described the external behavior, in order to show the humannature, she used the dialogues, emotional words and symbolic expressions to show themoment thought of every character. In order to explore this deep tunnel, Woolf addedfactors of poetry and drama, to make the novel as a comprehensive form.Chapter2is primarily talk about Woolf’s views of biography and characteristics onher biographies. By reading Orlando, Flush: a biography, we could see she wasanti-Victorian hero biography and resentful the traditional biography with full of lifedetails. Her biography recorded the details of the characters’ lives; also she added a lotof awareness and described the characters’ thoughts. She believed that the newbiography was the future of biography. Because the new biography was basis on the fact,it could change perspective and pay attention to human consciousness; it was full ofimagination, so it was easy to shape the character of the "character".Chapter3is about Woolf’s view on criticism style. We considered Woolf’scriticized articles were based on reading rather than logic, she used essay to show whatshe had known about the books which she had read already. Her writer’s identity, theposition of the common reader, personalized language and impression words, these are the features of her criticism. Because it is more concerned about the rules of literature,emphasizing the "literary criticism" in "literature" rather than "criticism", thewriter-criticism is useful complement to the current literary criticism.The last one is the conclusion, by carefully analyzed Woolf’s literary style, such asnovel, biography and criticism; we found that stylistic exploration is one of the sourcesof Woolf’s innovation: Without removing the distinctive features of the style, rubbedinto other stylistic factors, she made her own unique style. For example, with novels asthe main body, added into poetry and drama, then formed a new novel style: Betweenthe Acts; Biography mixed fiction as a new one: Orlando, and Flush: a biography withanimals’ perspective. Standing in common reader position, her impression criticism wasa challenge for the professional criticism at that time. So, in a sense, Woolf’s innovativeideas came from the mixing of the different literary style.