Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 From Woman Reader to Woman Writer: The Voyage Out
- 2 Tradition and Exploration in Night and Day
- 3 Literature and Survival: Jacob's Room and Mrs Dalloway
- 4 To the Lighthouse and the Ghost of Leslie Stephen
- 5 Rewriting Literary History in Orlando
- 6 ‘Lives Together’: Literary and Spiritual Autobiographies in The Waves
- 7 Bringing the Literary Past to Life in Between the Acts
- Conclusion
- Select Bibliography
- Index
5 - Rewriting Literary History in Orlando
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 From Woman Reader to Woman Writer: The Voyage Out
- 2 Tradition and Exploration in Night and Day
- 3 Literature and Survival: Jacob's Room and Mrs Dalloway
- 4 To the Lighthouse and the Ghost of Leslie Stephen
- 5 Rewriting Literary History in Orlando
- 6 ‘Lives Together’: Literary and Spiritual Autobiographies in The Waves
- 7 Bringing the Literary Past to Life in Between the Acts
- Conclusion
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Orlando is often taken on Woolf's own estimation as ‘an escapade’ (D, III. 131) and viewed as a lighthearted comic piece. However, when read in the context of Woolf's engagement with the literary past, it can be seen to serve the serious purpose of critiquing the assumptions of patriarchal literary history and developing feminist perspectives to replace them. Although Woolf's use of parody in Orlando is undoubtedly comic, it is also layered and strategic. On the one hand, her parody of academic conceptions is satirical: she mocks conventional approaches to literary history (as well as biography and history) by mimicking them in the voice of the narrator and the mock scholarly apparatus of preface, footnotes and index, all of which are shown to be inadequate frameworks for addressing the complex subject-matter of a character who lives for 350 years and changes sexes part-way through. She also attacks the literary-critical establishment through the heavily satirised figure of Nick Greene who sets himself up as an arbiter of taste, but is merely a self-publicist seeking financial gain (as a Renaissance and Restoration hack) and society's esteem (as a Victorian knighted professor). On the other hand, Woolf's parodies of English literary styles and her allusions to a wide range of texts and authors from the Renaissance to the present are more subtle and complex.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virginia Woolf's Novels and the Literary Past , pp. 132 - 159Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006