Virginia Woolf's Realistic Art In Between The Acts

Mrs.Virginia Woolf,always under the focus of many critics,is generally acknowleged as a prolific modernist female writer in the history of British literature. All her life Woolf has subsequently dedicated to her readers a good number of novels, short stories,essays and literary criticism,all containing her distinguished and creative thoughts,which contribute a lot to the spiritual promotion of human beings.Devoting all her body and soul to art,Woolf is always in the process of perfecting her artistic creations.Woolf writes along with other modernist representatives at her time such as James Joyce,William Faulkner,Marcel Proust and T.S.Eliot,and to some extent,she is even more influential than her contemporary male writers.Among Woolf's novels, To the Lighthouse,Mrs.Dalloway and The Waves undoubtedly enjoy the most popularity,whereas Between the Acts,her last masterpiece,also creatively and wittily written,is unexpectedly underestimated.This paper aims to restate the significance of Between the Acts,as well as its historical and literary value.By analyzing the novel and connecting it to the historical background,Woolf's change in her art and her concern about social reality will be stressed.The survival of Woolf's art in wartime, reflected in this novel as the coexistence between harmony and discord and the survival of harmony in discord,has added complexity to Woolf's last novel and even makes it surpass all the previous ones in terms of Woolf's searching for a way out for her art.This paper includes six parts.The introduction generalizes Woolf's life and her great contributions to the world literary circle.It also clarifies the purpose of writing this paper and the significance of this research.Chapter One devotes itself to a brief review of the modernist time—the historical background concerning Between the Acts.Besides,the famous literary circle Bloomsbury is introduced,while its influence upon Woolf and her art is also revealed. It is worth mentioning that in her creation,Woolf's concern with form is as significant as her concern with content.Chapter Two includes a detailed textual analysis on this novel.It focuses on how art keeps its continuity in the discontinuous and fragmented life,revealing that it is the last time for Woolf,as a modernist writer,to struggle for keeping her modernist ideal.Chapter Three discusses Woolf's "realistic art" through her innovation of form and artistic experimentation in Between the Acts,including the cubist structure of the novel,narrative techniques as well as carnivalesque phenomenon in it.Chapter Four deals with the postmodernist elements in Between the Acts.The novel was written in the transitional period when modernism became faded and postmodernism was in its shaping.Woolf reluctantly admits the unavoidable invasion of social reality into her art,which,on the contrary,is quite easily accepted by the postmodernists,who have already embraced the reality for what it is.The conclusion describes Woolf's physical and spiritual situation when writing Between the Acts.This part also analyzes the cause of Woolf's suicide and affirms the historical,social and artistic value of the novel.