The Waves (1931) is Virginia Woolf's most experimental and saturated piece of writing. During the process of composition its self-awareness was prefigural. That is to say, its production of sound, figure, and language were ahead of the author's conscious intention to the extent that she was – famously – obliged to go stumbling after her own seemingly autonomous voice. In one sense, then, The Waves obviously represents a high-Modernist breaking and remaking of novelistic form. But in another sense it is really the acme of a certain kind of rhetoric in which Woolf was long practised and in which she had achieved great facility; and it takes that sort of fluency about as far as Woolf would have wished to go.

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Published 18 July 2002

Citation: Stewart, James. "The Waves". The Literary Encyclopedia. 18 July 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8106, accessed 9 February 2010.]