Virginia Woolf As A Critic Of Novel

Ever since a long time ago,as long as we mentioned Virginia Woolf,"stream of consciousness"and"feminism"were following her.In fact,Woolf is only a person,to be exact,she is a person with insanity.In my opinion,just because of this temperament and her imagination, makes her to be a successful writer.Also,she is a person that treats reading and writing as her life.She holds back the disaster with one hand,and writes down something she wants with the other hand.In this article,we talk about Virginia Woolf only as a critic of novel.This article altogether has six parts.The first part is woolf's comments on English novels.The second part is her comments on female writer and female novel.The third part is about future novel,and the last part includes some weak points about her criticism.Generally, many scholars think no matter Woolf's novel or her criticism about novel,she is definitely a modernist.Actually,Woolf really cares about the tradition of literature,especially the English tradition of literature.She is crazy about some traditional writers,for example,Shakespeare,Stein,Austen,Hardy.And we want to focus on Hardy in this article.Woolf praises his novel in details,circumstance,words and so on.Of course,to praise him all the time is a little unsuitable,but we can know Woolf also likes tradition at least.We all know that,in the beginning of the twentieth century,Woolf and Bennett had a big argument about tradition and modern.Woolf named three writers"materialist".But we should know that Woolf has a standard line between tradition and modern,and this standard is human nature.What she wants is eternal and real human nature,so Woolf did not totally negate this three writers.But when she walked into the modern writers with human nature,she felt irresolute.She was afraid to criticize modern writers.Laurence proved her worries in this paper.The son and the lover shocked Woolf a lot.But she had no word on the most important point about this novel,and I think it is reasonable.Ever since a long time ago,people treat A room of one's own as a declaration of feminism,but in my opinion,no matter her or her characters in the novel,are far from radicals.In a room of one's own,she pretended an architect,she built a room for female.This room is a refuge rather than a cradle of female literature.Woolf totally realized and accepted the truth that men and women are not fair.She still saw a violent men's world through her own room.So she hided in her own room,for one thing,she can avoid the suffering,for another,she can write anything she likes.So Woolf is not a feminist.Future novel is one of the important parts in Woolf's criticism.For Woolf,the tradition,the modern and the future are tight together.In the beginning of twentieth century,many people think novel is out of its date.But Woolf had the whole confidence about the future novel.She thought the future form of novel should synthesize all different kinds of literary forms,such as poem,essay and opera.And obviously,this future novel is more and more popular today.At the last part of the paper,we talk about some weak points of Woolf's criticism,that is her impressionist method of criticize.This method regards feeling and impression as important,and look down upon the theory.She thinks intuition so highly that we can not find a systematic point in her criticism.However,Woolf's words is different from other writings,and we are affected by this distinctive way.To sum up,we know further about Virginia Woolf as a critic of novel,on the other hand,we make her theory as a whole system,and this,on a certain extent,enrich the research of western novel criticism.