Faculty of Humanities, English Philology

"In this paper I argue that characterization in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is in many ways conditioned by, and is deeply reflective of, the experience of the urban environment in the early twentieth century.

I argue that characterization was a formative and consistent concern for Woolf, using evidence from her early journalism and from her debates with Arnold Bennett to support this contention. This allows me to re-situate Woolf’s novels as novels of character; that is, they are in many ways structured around experiments in the literary representation of human beings as characters. I then move on to look at the formal shaping of character in The Waves, the ways the text elicits a sense of character in the reader through the employment of recurrent linguistic patterns, arguing that it is in large measure contingent upon, or contiguous with, the novel’s presentation of the experience of urbanity in terms of fragmentation, movement, and multiplicity. I use a contrast between the text’s characterization of Susan, who is associated throughout the novel with the rural, and its characterization of Bernard, who is generally associated with the urban, as evidence for my argument. I also provide a close reading of Bernard’s train journey to London as an instance of the formation of a modernist urban character.

This paper thus seek to map out a series of connections between Woolf’s emerging modernist conception of character and her sense of the modern urban environment."

In this paper I argue that Virginia Woolf’s novels develop a literary blueprint for a female artistic hero which challenges Victorian, Edwardian, and indeed Modernist notions of the male artist hero.

I first argue that the female artist is a central figure in many of Woolf’s novels, including The Voyage Out, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts. This allows me to re-situate Woolf’s work as a progressive exploration of the figure of the female artist. I then move on to look at the ways Woolf’s female artist heroes develop from the tentative formulation of the possibility of female artistic heroism in Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out, to the aesthetically triumphant figure of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, to Woolf’s final assertion of an ironic heroic stature for Miss LaTrobe in her last novel Between the Acts. Each of these readings considers the ways Woolf situates her artistic heroes in opposition to male figures within their respective texts, and the ways they relate to the portrayal of broader socio-historical forces shaping the lives of these characters.

This paper thus seeks to trace the development of the female artistic hero in Virginia Woolf’s work from its earliest formulations to its final culmination in the context of literary and socio-historical developments.

Characterisation was a central feature of Woolf’s dispute with Bennett. Critics generally take class or gender as the debate’s unarticulated basis. Both positions have been powerfully argued, effacing the centrality of character to the argument.

In this paper I challenge the class-based reading of the debate, most forcefully made by Samuel Hynes, and the feminist reading proposed by Beth Rigel Daugherty, which situates the debate within a conflict over women’s intellectual and artistic abilities. While recognising the validity of both positions, I argue that their claims need to be tempered by a re-examination of the evidence for both class and feminist interpretations.

In place of the two opposed readings, I then argue for the centrality of character and characterisation to the debate, situating it in the context of Woolf and Bennett’s protracted engagement with issues of characterisation in their criticism. Finally, I highlight some of the respects in which their critical perspectives on character intersect in spite of the pronounced differences in their actual writing of character. For both authors, character was central to the fictional enterprise, and this is an important perspective to recover following the late twentieth century’s neglect of character as a critical category.

Kubrick's film's satiric approach to war as a human activity, and his linkage of war with other forms of human aggression and stupidity, make it one of the few movies that avoids the dangers of glorification and justification inherent in the war-movie genre.

"The primary claim of this paper is that unfulfilled desire shapes the aesthetic form of To the Lighthouse.

I argue that the novel’s characters are emotionally structured around unfulfilled desire: the unattainable Mrs Ramsay is a clear focus of this longing, but other characters contribute to the pattern. Charles Tansley, for instance, desires the social acceptance he is unable to achieve, while even a character as apparently free from desire as Mr Carmichael is subject to a passion for Andrew Ramsay. The primary emotional tone of the novel is thus one of perpetual craving.

Woolf theorized a linkage between form and emotion in the novel as a genre. Having established literally tantalizing desire as To the Lighthouse’s emotional texture, I trace the ways its form reflects this. The novel’s tripartite structure has frequently been seen in relation to its temporal scheme, with the middle section bridging past and present. I argue instead that this section of the novel acts as an empty center, a vision of a world without desire. Surrounding this in the novel’s other two sections are a series of formal gestures – sometimes gestures of astonishing literalness - irradiating this emptiness with longing. The structural middle of the novel is analogous to the emotional center of the novel’s characters, an empty space which calls for, yet resists, the urgency of desire.

Finally, I move on to look at the role of aesthetic completeness in reconciling the novel’s two visions of life-as-desire and lifelessness-without-desire. On the aesthetic level, Lily Briscoe’s painting and the formal completion of the novel itself imply that the cycle of desire can be broken, or at least temporarily suspended, by aesthetic means. On the level of character and emotion, Lily’s relationship with William Bankes offers a similar potential for disrupting the imperative of desire."

Critics claim that the Neo-Historical novel offers a “critical reformulating” of the past rather than simply wallowing in “immobilizing nostalgia” for a vanished era (Hutcheon 209). In Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series of Neo-Noir novels, this reformulation takes the shape of a re-encounter with the Nazi era through the familiar generic conventions of the hardboiled thriller. This approach results in an unsettling de-familiarisation of an all-to-familiar historical epoch.

Kerr’s novels combine their hard-boiled thriller conventions with a very high degree of period detail. This detail creates a sense of historical verisimilitude, allowing readers to situate themselves within a rich and deep historical setting, but also activates nostalgic energies, for nostalgia is object-centred, requiring “mnemonic devices” upon which to fasten itself (Boym 346). This is not revisionist nostalgia “for a past that never existed,” for Nazi-era Germany is not conceived of as a ‘good’ place, but its energies work to draw readers into an encounter with the imagined past (Ellroy 3). In addition, Kerr’s choice of genre transposes a familiar structure and style onto an unfamiliar context. These novels are what Raymond Chander, master of the genre, describes as “hardboiled chronicles of mean streets with a [. . .] mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini,” invocations of “a world in which gangsters can rule nations” (990, 991).

By combining nostalgic detail and a nostalgic genre, Kerr draws the moral dilemmas, turmoil, and crimes of Nazi Germany into proximity with contemporary experience. Rather than reading history from a safe distance, this is reading history uncomfortably close: the familiar historical spectacle of Nazi terror becomes the unfamiliar sensation of terror in normal life.

Works Cited

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Print.

Chander, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder”. Raymond Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995. 977 - 992. Print.

Ellroy, James. American Tabloid. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 1988. Print.

"Jonathan Littell’s 2006 novel Les Bienveillantes (Translated into English as The Kindly Ones) is extremely challenging in both its subject and approach. Purporting to be the memoirs of SS-officer Maximilien Aue, it represents many of World War II’s most grievous atrocities in graphic detail, offering what has been described as “a high degree of ‘experientiality’” of these horrors (Grethlein 575). The novel is widely celebrated, yet it is also widely reviled for its representation of Nazi crimes. One critic, for instance, describes the novel’s flawed “poetics of horror” as transforming the author into a “pornographer of violence” (Mönninger). This controversy indicates how problematic the literary representation of historical suffering can be.
In this paper, I argue that Littell’s novel offers an appropriate aesthetic response to this suffering in two interconnected ways. Firstly, it matches the excessive, overwhelming, historical suffering of the period with an overwhelming excess of narrative. The length of the book itself, the length of the passages describing atrocities, and the descriptive excess of the prose in which the atrocities are described are an aesthetic, and indeed an ethical, correlative to the suffering of the Nazi’s victims.
Secondly, The Kindly Ones controversially transforms mass historical suffering into individual suffering by looking not to an individual victim, but to an individual perpetrator. As the reader is gradually overwhelmed, and thus desensitized, by the depiction of historical suffering, the second narrative strand revealing Aue’s personal suffering –– both emotional and physical –– works to enhance out capacity as readers to continue to perceive and experience the suffering of others.





Works Cited
Grethlein, Jonas “S. S. Officers as Tragic Heroes? Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes and the Narrative Representation of the Shoah”. Style 44.4 (2010) : 566 - 585. Print.
Mönninger, Michael. “The banalisation of evil”. Trans. Naomi Buck. Signandsight.com. 21 September 2009. Web."

"Outside of Sweden, Hjalmar Bergman’s 1919 modernist masterpiece Markurells I Wadköping is undeservedly neglected. This early one-day novel depicts a moment of intense, and intensely painful, social transition as the town of Wadköping’s seemingly stable social hierarchy is undermined by the assaults of a grotesque outsider, H. H. Markurell. Simultaneously, Markurell’s interaction with the town’s aristocratic establishment ultimately leads to his own destruction. Bergman’s novel thus portrays not just the collapse of the aristocratic dispensation under the pressures of early twentieth century history, but also the ways the interaction between the aristocratic and the plebeian, the traditional and the modern, can damage both.

The destruction of Wadköping society occurs both financially and morally. Wadköping’s elite has long depended on District Judge de Lorche to guide it through the complexities of an emerging modern economy. He seems to combine the assurance of aristocratic probity and with the ability to operate in industry and finance. The town’s traditional authorities look to him for leadership and guidance. However, he is ultimately revealed as being unable to cope with modern globalized finance, and is ruined (in part through the workings of Markurell). Morally, the damage done to the aristocratic elite is even more profound, as a centuries old tradition of noblesse oblige and ethical superiority unravels and is revealed as illusory. Yet the novel presents this dual failure as a tragedy as well as a punishment.

In spite of his financial triumph, Markurell is in turn destroyed through his interaction with the aristocratic elements of Wadköping. As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear first to the reader and ultimately to Markurell himself that his beloved son is in fact de Lorche’s child rather than his own. This revelation leads, ultimately, to Markurell’s emotional collapse and untimely death. And while Markurell is not a sympathetic character his destruction is, like that of Wadköping’s aristocracy, acknowledged as a form of tragedy.

Ultimately, Markurells in Wadköping depicts a world in which an aristocratic system fails before an emerging modernity with which it is patently unable to cope, yet still inflicts terrible damage on the people who are supplanting it. In this lies the ultimately tragic vision of the novel.


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Virginia Woolf has for many years been seen as a key participant in British literary modernism. Following a period of relative critical neglect following her tragic death in 1941, her body of work has earned her recognition as a groundbreaking feminist thinker, a perceptive literary critic, a formidably creative diarist and correspondent, and as one of the twentieth century’s leading essayists. Most notably, her experimental fiction, from her first novel The Voyage Out to the posthumously published Between the Acts, has grown in both popularity and critical renown. All of her work remains in print, and novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Jacob’s Room are regularly read and discussed both inside and outside the academy. Few modernist writers––indeed, few writers of any period–have had such a pronounced and lasting impact on literary culture.

There has been, and continues to be, an enormous amount of critical and scholarly work done on almost all aspects of Woolf’s writing and life. Monographs, journal articles, and collections of essays dedicated to Woolf’s writing appear every year alongside scholarly and popular biographies, and there is an annual international conference dedicated solely to her work. Yet amidst this veritable inundation of exegetical energy, this tremendous and ever-growing body of scholarly work on Woolf, there is one curious omission. While Woolf was both in theory and practice fascinated by questions of character and characterization, scholarship has not generally been directed towards this field. This may be due to both general theoretical discomfort with the critical category of character, and to a sense that Woolf’s work in particular may not respond well to such interpretations. However, Woolf was very much an experimenter in character, and readings that minimize or ignore this interest miss an important facet of her work.

This book offers the first full-length reading of Virginia Woolf’s career-long experimentation in character. It examines her early journalism, from her short reviews of contemporary literature to more substantial essays on Gissing and Dostoyevsky, for indications of her engagement with questions of characterization, and links this interest to her later fictional writings. In The Voyage Out she establishes a continuum of levels of characterization, a key element of which is the Theophrastan type, an alternative form of characterization that corresponds to a way of knowing real people, while in Jacob’s Room she seeks to represent an elusive ‘essence’ that may exist outside of the structuring forms of social life, and which is accessible through speculative identification. Mrs Dalloway explores the shaping of character through social pressure, and To the Lighthouse proposes a simplified version of character as an ethically acceptable way of relating to other people. A similar notion is picked up in The Waves, in which a limited character, or form of caricature, is proposed as a possible solution to the problems of characterization. In Between the Acts, many of these themes reappear as Woolf simultaneously situates her characters more firmly than ever in a comprehensible physical and social context, and explores areas where language and rationality fail.

This paper responds to Woolf’s linkage of emotion and novelistic form by tracing the formal consequences of the foundational emotion of To the Lighthouse, unfulfilled desire. The novel’s tripartite structure of an empty center surrounded by longing derives from this emotion. This pattern is repeated in a series of formal attempts to illuminate emptiness. The novel’s characters, too, are built around empty spaces which attract yet resist desire. However, Lily Briscoe’s painting and the completion of the novel itself imply that the cycle of desire can be suspended, and Lily’s relationship with William Bankes similarly disrupts desire’s imperative.

Hilary Mantel is perhaps the preeminent writer of the human body in distress and the social repercussions this distress entails. This focus on the corporal and on the social and conceptual structures that circle around it is clear in both her historical fiction and her non-fiction, as well as in a number of her contemporary literary novels.
This paper focuses on Mantel’s first two published novels, the 1985-1986 diptych Every Day is Mother’s Day and Vacant Possession, in which Mantel begins her exploration of the horrific potential of human corporality by inverting the network of meanings frequently associated with two types of caregiving: care for children and care for the elderly. This occurs through the intertwining of two superficially very different families and two different literary genres.
Evelyn Axon and her malignant, and according to the social services mentally sub-normal daughter, Muriel inhabit a world of gothic horror. Central to their story is a persistent failure of caring manifested in, for example, Muriel’s status as a fundamentally ‘wrong’ child who eludes and deceives the hapless attempts of her institutional caregivers, and her pregnancy which results in both infanticide and matricide. Parallel and connected in terms of plot is the bleak social realism of the ‘normal’ Sidney family, whose own failures of care (a miserable domestic life, petulant children, extra-marital affairs, and neglect of their aged relatives—all the familiar material of mid-century realist literary fiction) are given a terrible slant by their proximity to, and gradually increasing involvement with, the horrific tale of the Axons.
Mantel thus envisions a world in which ‘normal’ processes of care giving, both biological and social, are seen as fundamentally tainted.

Although Eileen Chang‘s work falls late in the modernist period, and much of her work can be related to Qing vernacular fiction and Edwardian realism, some of her writing clearly displays its modernist heritage. Karen Kingsbury describes the short story “Sealed Off”, for instance, as a “modernist slice-of-life anti-romance.” However, “Sealed Off” is a romance precisely insofar as it is modernist, using modernist textual and thematic tropes to create an alternative to a dystopian wartime Shanghai and its deforming social pressures. Much of Chang’s fiction deals with the failure of love in the face of, for instance, patriarchal expectation or political expedience, yet in “Sealed Off”, separation from the quotidian creates an explicitly modernist space of utopian potentiality within which love can thrive, if only temporarily. Isolated from the ‘normal’ city by a military emergency, by their presence on a tramcar, and by a textual separation enacted by a “line that cut through time and space,” the story’s main characters, Wu Cuiyuan and Lu Zhongzhen, are able to imagine a love outside their own limited and limiting lives. The story ends however, with the reassertion of a normalcy that reduces this modernist alternative to an “unreasonable dream.”

China Miéville is one of the best representatives of the twenty-first century’s questioning of the division between literary and genre fiction, and of the tendency toward generic hybridity in contemporary writing. He has often been seen as a proponent and practitioner of both formal and thematic hybridity, a writer whose hybrid literary forms celebrate social and cultural hybridity.  This element of his work has been identified in, for instance, Perdido Street Station (2000). However, in both this novel and, more clearly, in The City & The City  (2009) elements of the narratives, particularly their endings and their manipulation of genre norms, indicate a clear awareness of the difficulties and limitations of cultural, personal, and even textual, hybridity.

Hjalmar Bergman’s formally innovative 1919 novel The Markurells of Wadko ̈ping deals with the clash between the traditional aristocratic dispensation and the socially disruptive forces of modernity. These opposed orders are embodied in two characters, Carl-Magnus de Lorche and Herr Markurell, whose connections and conflicts come to represent the destiny of society as a whole as it attempts to cope with the emergence of the new.

Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) is challenging in both its subject and approach. Purporting to be the memoirs of SS-officer Maximilien Aue, it represents many of the Second World War’s most grievous atrocities in graphic detail, an approach which has been criticized as a “poetics of horror” created by “pornographer of violence”. However, Littell’s transgression of the literary norms of Holocaust representation though minimalist underwriting by the employment of an aesthetics of excess is not gratuitous; instead, it both revitalizes the reader’s reaction to the depicted historical events, and extends their ethical implications beyond their historical moment.