Analysis Of The Stream-Of Consciousness Novel By Virginia Woolf

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As an important writer of the Stream-of-Consciousness Novel, Virginia Woolf is one of the most prominent women writers in the history of modern English literature. Under the influence of western philosophy and psychology in the 20th century, she devoted to the reform of novel-writing. She attacked the traditional manner of novel-writing by pointing out that it paid too much attention to exterior details but ignored the inner world of man. She thus asked writers to explore the inner life and called for a new kind of novel, as represented by Ulysses. To Woolf, the world where we live is fragmentary, and disorderly. The purpose of the Modernist writings is to “reveal the true nation of the modern human condition and its disconcerting absence of meaning, purpose, and order.” (Chang Yaoxin, A Survey of British Literature 383)
Woolf always tried to innovate the treatment of time in her novels to depict characters in a better and truer way. Therefore, sequential time gave way to psychological time, and vivid pictures of self-consciousness and the minds of people were presented by the freely flow of inner time. To her, inner time, having no limitations and boundaries, can combine the past memories, the present reality, and the future imaginations together, enabling the novel to be more real and appealing.
Being her second to last work, The Years is Woolf’s longest work with the richness in content and aesthetic significance. It narrates the vicissitudes of the three generations in