2 Research Argument

Virginia Woolf has achieved a renowned canonical status as one of the foremost modernists in the twentieth century for her experimental writing style of stream of consciousness,multi-voiced narratives and deconstruction of linear temporality.Thus Woolf is easily regarded by critics as a modernist writer who only concerns the modernist writing techniques and intends to represent“a flight from history into the mind of the individual”(Spiropoulou 2),so that her“readers should look for symbols and evocations of mood in her works rather than for sequences of events,for stories”(Reid 1).Even her husband Leonard Woolf,nephew Quentin Bell and some close friends hold the same view that sets the tone that Woolf is an ahistorical writer.Leonard Woolf mentioned that his wife,Virginia Woolf was“the least political animal that has lived since Aristotle invented the definition”(Leonard Woolf,Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 27).Woolf's nephew Quentin Bell also wrote in the biography of his aunt that Woolf was“always talking about people,never about politics”(Quentin Bell,Virginia Woolf: A Biography II 77); and he also wrote that it was an exceptional effort for her to support actively the great railway strike of 1919,which seemed to perpetuate the image of Woolf as an ahistorical writer.After reading Virginia Woolf's Roger Fry: A Biography,Benedict Nicolson,Vita's son,mentioned in a letter to Virginia Woolf that he was disappointed with the Bloomsbury Group,whom he saw as a group that“had been living in a fool's paradise,enjoying cultivated pleasures while it neglected the first duty of the intellectual,which is to save the world from its follies”(Qtd.Quentin Bell,Virginia Woolf: A Biography II 220).

Not only did Virginia Woolf's family members and close friends claim that she did not represent her concern about history in her works,but some critics also criticized her for her shutting out all the ranges of experience of an external world in favor of the sophisticated aestheticism.F.R.Leavis,one of her contemporary critics,claimed in Scrutiny in 1942 that“how little of human experience-how little of life-comes within Mrs.Woolf's scope”(Leavis 297).David Daiches also argued in the same year 1942 that“Virginia Woolf remained on the whole outside politics,content to justify her position implicitly and unanswerably by her creative work”(Daiches 140).In the 1950s,D.S.Savage criticized Woolf's less concern about the spiritual and social awareness.In 1965,Jean Guiguet,a French researcher,argued in monograph Virginia Woolf and her Works that Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own failed to prepare us a better solution to“discover certain trends in the rest of her work”and they could not provide exactly what trends or which“contemporary…social and political problems”in her works,which could help readers understand the historical context in her time (Guiguet 192).The reason why a large number of researchers think that Virginia Woolf is an ahistorical and apolitical writer is that they are fascinated much with Woolf's experimental modernist fictions rather than her nonfictional writings.

Since the publication of Woolf's diary entries and letters in the 1970s,Woolf's criticism of society,politics and culture has become the subject of scholarly research,thus enriching the studies of both Virginia Woolf and her works.In the 1970s,researchers were fascinated with feminist approaches to Virginia Woolf herself,her modernist literary theories and her narrative strategies.Alice Van Buren Kelley studied the dualism of fact and fiction in The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Fact and Vision,in which she argued that the factual world was“the world of the social actions that get one from breakfast”(Kelley 3),and it was“also the world of the intellect that perceives the isolation of men and objects and attempts to find order,using only the tools of objective reason”(Kelley 4).She continued to argue that the vision could help the fact“transcend the limits of objective,physical truth”,and the fact could assist the vision“leap the unity”based on the solid fact.She drew on Woolf's use of the dualism of fact and fiction,and studied how Virginia Woolf balanced the dualism between fact and vision in her eight novels.In the 1980s,critics grew to accept that Woolf was concerned of history and they studied the relationship between Woolf's artistic writing and the real world.Alex Zwerdling mentioned in his Virginia Woolf and the Real World (1986) that Woolf's“complex sense of how historical forces and societal institutions influence the behavior of the people she describes in her fictional and nonfictional works”(Zwerdling 3).

As a victim of war,Woolf records in her works nearly all kinds of wars' threat to human's civilization in her time to show her strong hatred of wars.Mark Hussey argued that Virginia Woolf's works seemed to be“deeply concerned with wars”(Hussey 3),and she studied the relation between the wars in Woolf's time and those in her works by focusing on the historical change,biographical details and the wars' influence.In the 1990s,two insightful papers touched on the topic of Woolf's ideas on history.The first was“Virginia Woolf on History: Between Tradition and Modernity”written by Hotho-Jackson,which argued that Woolf's concept of reality was“a continuous merging of the past and the present moment in the individual's mind,which placed her with the moderns”(Hotho-Jackson 295).The other one was“Virginia Woolf and the Varieties of Historicist Experience”written by Melba Cuddy-Keane,which rejected the traditional historical paradigms that view history“as linear,political and monumental”(Cuddy-Keane 65).

Since the 2000s,there have been some insightful papers and works published concerning Virginia Woolf's ideas on history.Critics began to study Woolf's concept of history connected with modernism and postmodernism contexts.Beth Carole Rosenberg studied Woolf's postmodern literary history from the perspective of diachronic and synchronic frame to conclude that Woolf was such a historian who led readers to“read history as a series of unrelated moments,moments whose unity comes through a narrative that tells us more about its own construction than it does about the past”(Rosenberg 1128).Angeliki Spiropoulou assumed in Virginia Woolf,Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin that Woolf's modernist works were“not only deeply implicated in the historical actuality of modernity but at the same time a means of critically (re)doing historiography”(Spiropoulou 2).

Despite the considerable contributions to Woolf studies from the historicist perspective,the previous studies are not quite systematic.Although they have agreed that Virginia Woolf's works are rooted in the historical contexts,there are still some spaces untouched and some questions unexplored: such as what is Virginia Woolf's view on history and historiography? How did the history Virginia Woolf experienced in the real world influence her artistic creation? Do her works reflect the historical facts which she has experienced? How does she integrate historical factuality and historical narration? What are the strategies she adopts to narrate history in her works? What is her political intention of narrating history in her modernist works? What is the significance of her historical narration? How does she establish her position as a forerunner of the New Historicists of the late twentieth century? On the basis of Virginia Woolf's novels,letters,biographies,autobiographies,diary entries,manuscripts,and archival documents,this book finds innovation in attempting to represent some lessknown history of this female writer and her view of history and historiography;it also finds significance on the basis of New Historicist criticism in exploring the reconstruction of family history,social history,and national history.