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Virginia Woolf wrote both prose and poetry, both fiction and non-fiction: she was both a creative writer and a politically conscious reporter. She left a wealth of beautifully crafted observations and comments that continue to be immensely quotable and influential. Feminist critics today use Woolf's vocabulary to continue the feminist conversation which she entered early in her life and consistently influenced as long as she lived and wrote. My purpose in this essay is to identify some of the ways in which feminists strategically use references to Virginia Woolf and A Room of One's Own to empower their own perspective or to develop legitimacy for their own knowledge and discourse. / Graduation date: 1992

No study of Virginia Woolf can do justice to the complexity of her life and work without taking into account the numerous contradictions present in her thought. Though Woolf is recognized as a revolutionary contributor to the development of modernism, it is also important to remember that she was born in 1882 and that the nineteenth century also left its mark on her. The first chapter will examine this double sensibility. The second chapter will trace the development of Woolf's modernist aesthetic. She was obviously rebelling against the realism valued by her Victorian and Edwardian predecessors when she conceived of a literary style capable of abstracting from purely formal elements a more "profound reality" than that captured by objective and representational descriptions. Despite this revolutionary tendency, she constructs a hierarchy of "realities" that is somewhat elitist in its mysticism and runs counter to the revolutionary feminist and Marxist thought evident in so much of her work. The last chapter will examine the contradictions that riddle Woolf's feminist writings.

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This thesis explores the importance of the visionary experience in five novels by Virginia Woolf. In her fiction, Woolf portrays the phenomenal world as constantly changing and she uses the cycles of nature and the passing of time as a terrifying backdrop against which the mutability and transience of human life are set. Faced with the inevitability of change and the fact of mortality, the individual seeks moments of permanence. These stand in opposition to flux and lead to the experience of a visionary intensity. Woolf's presentation of time as a qualitative phenomenon and her stress on the importance of memory as a function which allows for the intermingling of past and present make possible the narrative rendering of moments which contradict perpetual change and the rigours of sequential time. Moments of stillness 'occur in the midst of and in spite of process and allow for individual contact with an experience that defies the relentless progression of time. Necessary for this experience is not only memory but also the imagination, a faculty which has the power to perceive patterns of harmony in the midst of the chaos that characterises the phenomenal realm. Fundamental to Woolf's writing, however, is the acknowledgement that visions are fleeting, as are the glimpses of meaning that emerge from them. Therefore, while several of her novels describe the artistic effort to create a structured order as a defense against change, Woolf uses the artist's struggle as a metaphor for the difficulties attached to describing the enigma that is life. None of her artist figures is able to formulate a construction that either sums up life or provides a permanence of vision. This study presents a chronological examination of the novels in order to demonstrate that the changing forms of Woolf's fiction trace the evolution of a style that accurately portrays both the workings of the human mind and the insubstantial and fragmentary nature of life. The chronology also reveals that her novels develop in terms of their presentations of the visionary experience. Woolf's final novel incorporates into its central vision the paradoxical fact of the permanence of time's progression and acknowledges that, beyond the individually mutable life, is a continuum that links pre-history to the future. This notion, which is explored in part in the earlier novels, but developed completely in Between the Acts, suggests that consolation can be found in the greater cycles of existence despite the fact of individual mortality.

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by Kung Siu Bing. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-121). / Abstract and appendix in English and Chinese. / by Kung Siu Bing. / Abstract --- p.iii / Acknowledgement --- p.v / Abbreviations used for the four literary works --- p.vi / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Femininity and Masculinity --- p.14 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Androgyny --- p.51 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- Sex，Gender and Sexual Identity --- p.80 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- Multiple Selves --- p.102 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- Conclusion --- p.112 / Works Cited --- p.114 / Appendix I Chinese version of quotations of Shuang Shen --- p.122 / Appendix II Table of major characters of Shuang Shen and The Illusionist --- p.126

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