This dissertation is a study of the relationship between the modern Künstlerromane of Arnold Bennett, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf and issues of embodiment. Born of the field of aesthetics, the literary genre of Künstlerroman inherits its conflicts. The chief dilemma of the form is how an isolated artistic consciousness connects with the world through a creative act. Bennett, Joyce, and Woolf offer different and contradictory resolutions. By examining how each writer conceives the body, I discover in Woolf the idea of an ethical aesthetics that contravenes the assumed polarity between mind and body, between self and other, and between material and ideal. Written only a few years apart, Clayhanger (1910), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and The Voyage Out (1915) tell a compelling story of the relationship between embodiment and a creative life.

This thesis examines the way in which the fictional biographies of Virginia Woolf, Orlando and Flush, prefigure central tenets of postmodern fiction. To demonstrate the postmodern elements present in Orlando and Flush, this thesis focuses on how the fictional biographies exhibit three postmodern characteristics: concern for historiography, extensive use of parody, and the denaturalization of cultural assumptions. Born from Woolf’s desire to revolutionize biography by incorporating elements of fiction alongside historical fact, these two novels parallel later works of historiographic metafiction in several key respects. Woolf’s extensive use of parody in Orlando and Flush prefigures how postmodern parody foregrounds the many ways in which all narratives are inherently constructions. Woolf also expresses a postmodern attitude by denaturalizing cultural assumptions about sexual difference and social class. When taken together, these three traits reveal how Orlando and Flush possess an ontological philosophy indicative of postmodern literature.

This thesis outlines my research and creative process of how to direct modern theatre under the structure of the Ancient Greek chorus, specifically through movement. I include a brief history of how the chorus functioned in Ancient Greek theatre; how movement shaped the chorus’ role as well as the story for the audience. Using the parameters of the chorus, I directed two theatrical productions, Jason Robert Brown’s Parade, and Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Through exploration and analysis I conclude that using Ancient Greek choral movement in modern theatre helps to create a more specific story through gesture and space, bridges the gap between the audience and action onstage, and should be the foundation of how directing is taught in academic settings.

Children in modernist literature have been largely ignored in critical study; an odd oversight, since children in Victorian and contemporary literature have been sources of rich material for literary critics. In novels published from 1930 until 1934, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Evelyn Waugh address the relationships between children/childhood and nostalgia in The Apes of God (Lewis), The Waves (Woolf), and A Handful of Dust (Waugh). Their complicated and often conflicting depictions of childhood and desire for the past reveal children's overlooked importance in British modernism, as well as a lack of singularity in the manifestations of children and nostalgia that is crucial to contemporary understandings of both terms.

Anders Öhman argumenterar för att i litteraturundervisningen använda sig av en metod han väljer att kalla ”skugga intrigen”. Denna studies syfte har varit att försöka konkretisera hans analysmetod och att undersöka om den kan användas på texter som saknar en tydlig intrigstruktur. En analys av Öhmans bok har gjorts för att få fram ett tydligt tillvägagångssätt för analysen, vilket därefter har applicerats på Virginia Woolfs roman Mrs Dalloway. Analysen visade att en intrigskuggning av romanen var en besvärlig men ändock givande metod. Trots svårigheterna kring valet av viktiga tematikstödjande händelser blev intrigskuggningen en god lässtrategi för inlevelseläsningen. Störst möjligheter har metoden att genomföras muntligt i ett flerstämmigt klassrum samt som hjälpmedel och lässtrategi vid arbetet med svårare texter.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2006. / Title from PDF title page screen. Advisor: Keith Cushman, Annette Van; submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 76-79).

Considered mostly ancillary to her fiction, Virginia Woolf’s prolific career in literary criticism has rarely been studied in its entirety and in its own right. This study situates her in the common critical practices of her day and crystallizes basic tenets and a critical theory of sorts from her critical journalism published 1904–1928: the author argues that Woolf does not advocate a policing role for the critic, but rather that critics foster art in collaboration with readers and writers. Finally, this work discusses Woolf’s appeal to writers to invest all their energy in improving their skills in character portrayal to adequately depict all classes and genders in order to invent a new kind of psychological fiction.

My thesis is about Virginia Woolf’s novels, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse. I examine these novels in relation to the theories of Henri Bergson, William James, and Sigmund Freud, and the groundwork of Modernism. I relate Woolf's use of water imagery and stream of consciousness technique to Bergson’s theory of “la durée,” or psychological, subjective time, James’ “stream of consciousness” theory in psychology, and Freud’s theory of the “oceanic” feeling of religious experience.

solid objects is a collection of objects and its cultural life, where the roles of the object, artist, collector, museum, writer, publisher and curator are suspended to reemerge in other possible forms. In this work the text becomes an object, the pocket a museum, the collection a persona, the artist its curator, the writer a sign.

The thesis aims to explore how Virginia Woolf indicates the individual beauty in Mrs. Dalloway to free the meaning of a human being from the social construction. The social condition of Clarissa and Septimus as a woman and a mad man shows that an individual could be marginalized in the dominating ideology of the society. The relationship in which people judge and overwhelm one another with their own ideas and beliefs exposes similar violence. Through the aesthetic perspectives expressed in the characterization of Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway, however, Woolf discloses the beauty of existence itself. The aesthetics liberates the value of a human being from the social value systems and manifests the aesthetic relationship between different individuals who transcend the boundaries of time as well as body. In addition to Introduction and Conclusion, the thesis is divided into three chapters. In Chapter One, I investigate Mrs. Dalloway¡¦s and Septimus¡¦s marginalized social positions as a woman and a mad man in Britian in the early 20th century. As a woman, Mrs. Dalloway was confined to her domestic role and Septimus, as a mad man, was secluded from society. In this chapter, I argue that Mrs. Dalloway¡¦s party and Septimus¡¦s mad writing, as their way to change the status quo of the society, are their offerings to the world. Chapter Two investigates the dark desire to wield power over the others. Septimu¡¦s death and Mrs. Dalloway¡¦s perception of the beauty of the existence are taken as an escape/exit from this violence. Chapter Three explores the beauty of the existence and the aesthetic relationship between individuals beyond the violence of judgments and social construction Woolf reveals in Mrs. Dalloway.