A Novelist Who Painted Her Works

Virginia Woolf is one of the most outstanding writers and critics in English literature, and a key member of the Bloomsbury Group of the 20th century. She is believed to be one of the four"Stream of Consciousness novel writers"together with her contemporaries James Joyce , William Faulkner and Marcel Proust. Her achievements in literature still have enormous influence, so she has always been the concern of scholars at home and abroad. She has contributed a lot in the development of modern novel writings. All through her life, she had devoted herself to experimenting in modernist novel- writing both in theories and in practice. She maintained that novels should reveal the inner side of the human beings and also challenged the traditional novel writing technique.In Woolf's works, readers can find the painting elements frequently. The members of the Bloomsbury Group are artists and art theorists, so Woolf is, in a large extent, influenced by those Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and other painters. She tries to put the fleeting impressions of moments of people's life down on the paper with her subtle sensibility and makes her works eternal paintings out of her pen.This thesis consists of four parts, which mainly discusses the painting elements in Woolf's fictional works.The introduction talks about Virginia Woolf's life and works, the literature review on Woolf studies and the influence of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Chapter one aims at the world of paintings in Woolf's writing. And the artistic influence from her families and the Bloomsbury Group, especially the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist aesthetic theories brought to her by Roger Fry and Clive Bell.Chapter two focuses on Woolf's employment of two painting elements, light and colours, which makes readers see Woolf's"paintings"while she depicting the inner side of her characters.Chapter three discusses Woolf's tendency to capture the transient moment and her experiment on applying various imageries, showing her individual sensations of a specific transitory moment and the characters'mental activities that permeate into the transitory moments.From the discussion above, a conclusion is reached that Woolf's fictional works are works of verbal paintings. Woolf skillfully employs a number of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting techniques in portraying characters'psychological activities and their inquiry into the meaning of life. So after the polychromatic reading of Virginia Woolf's fictional works, we can say that she is a real artist in the literature world who painted her works.