Virginia Woolf, essayism, and the modern novel

The essay, as a central genre of the modern period, has been little studied. In my dissertation, I aim to redress this oversight and to demonstrate that the essay played a key and until now unrecognized role in the development of the modern British novel. Virginia Woolf was the most accomplished and innovative essayist of her generation. Her essays, long ignored by critics, have become the subject of increased interest over the last several years. By and large, however, the work done in this area remains in the shadow of a long tradition of feminist, political, and novel-centered criticism of Woolf's writing. My dissertation offers a new way of thinking about Woolf's essays, and about the essay's role in Modernism.; The core of my first chapter is a close reading of "Street Haunting" (1930), an essay in which Woolf demonstrates, both practically and theoretically, the potential of the essay form. My second chapter focuses on A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. I argue that the essayistic structure of Woolfs two extended essay-fictions calls for---and indeed, imposes---a liberty of movement that renders these political tracts not "political" at all. Rather, both works are concerned primarily with questions of literature and form that have little if anything to do with the polemical topics (women's liberation and war) that announce themselves initially.; My third chapter deals with The Pargiters (Woolf's unfinished essay-novel) and The Years, the novel that was "extracted" from this abandoned project when its initial ambitions proved untenable. I devote my final chapter to Arnold Bennett: partly to re-evaluate his notorious quarrel with Woolf, but also to initiate a comprehensive re-examination of the Edwardians within the modern period---and a broader generic understanding of Modernism. I argue finally that while Woolf produces her most effective picture of literary autonomy in her essays, Bennett does so in his novels. I end with a brief epilogue on Woolf's diaries, which suggests the ways in which this format allows Woolf to come closest to the fusion of the essayistic and the novelistic that eludes her elsewhere.