Virginia Woolf, The Waves

James Stewart (University of Dundee)
Download PDF Add to Bookshelf Report an Error
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.

Whether The Waves is in fact a novel may be questioned. Woolf herself thought it

1427 words

Citation: Stewart, James. "The Waves". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 July 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8106, accessed 19 March 2024.]

8106 The Waves 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.