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The Politics of Comic Modes in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Melba Cuddy-Keane
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Abstract

Comedy is the genre of collective experience; however, comic modes differ in the degree of inclusiveness that each implies. By examining the interactions of satiric, amiable, and liminal comedy, we can see how Woolfs final novel, Between the Acts, becomes a fully inclusive form. This form is radical and subversive, standing in antithetical relation to the epic genre. Woolf loosens the habitual dominance of the leader or spokesperson figure through a decentering of authority and creates a new choric voice that implies a fluid and noncoercive sense of community. This handling of genre is thoroughly political in substituting, for the definition of politics as the exercising of power, a model of community as the dynamic inhabiting of mutual space.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 2 , March 1990 , pp. 273 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

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