“Infinite Discords” in Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2025.54422Keywords:
Virginia Woolf, novel, literary forms, modernismAbstract
This article discusses Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), in connection with her ideas about modern fiction and its possible developments after the Second World War. Similarly to Eagleton (2005) and Bakhtin (2014), among other theorists, Woolf saw the novel as a “cannibalistic” form, capable of encompassing all others. Thus, essays such as “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (1927) and “Phases of Fiction” (1929) demonstrate the author’s interest in investigating the status of fiction in her time and her view that blurring the boundaries between poetry, prose and theater would make it possible to find new ways of representing modern life. Therefore, considering that the resistance to rules and definitions is inherent to the form of the novel, Woolf understood that prose fiction would be the best way to portray the many contradictions of feelings and experiences of the early twentieth-century individuals.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Carla Lento Faria (Autor)
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