3 Research Purpose,Scope and Methodology

With the advances of Woolf studies,more and more critics begin to realize that it is misleading to view Woolf as an ahistorical writer and it is even more misleading to claim that Woolf is only concerned of the modernist writing techniques regardless of the historical contexts in which her works were created.In her letters,diary entries,essays and speeches,she exposes her view on history and historiography differing from traditional historians,whose works Woolf thinks are“liable to degenerate into perfunctory factrecording”(Rosenberg 1117).

Not only does Woolf deal with history as pastness of the present,but she also emphasizes writers' role in reconstructing the past in the artistic creation.Virginia Woolf shows her insightful view of history and historiography in her diary entries,letters,essays,and novels.However,as seen from the literature review,a large number of questions concerning Virginia Woolf's view of history and historiography mentioned above remain unexplored systematically.Thus,this book aims to study Virginia Woolf's novels from the New Historicism.

First,this book seeks to study Virginia Woolf's view of history and historiography.Her view of history and historiography might be formed when she was a young girl as she was given the opportunity by her father to read history books in his library,which were written by famous historians,such as Gibbon,Macaulay,Carlyle and Water Scott.Contrary to her own remarks and her researchers' statement,Virginia Woolf enrolled in history courses at the Ladies' Department of King's College.She taught the working class men and women history at Morley College,and wrote some essays on history,such as“Unwritten History”and“The Historian and ‘ The Gibbon'”,and one short fiction“The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”.Besides,with strong determination to“write a historical disquisition”(Qtd.Quentin Bell,Virginia Woolf: A Biography II 76),she also expressed her view of history and historiography in her letters and diary entries.Therefore,this book aims to form a detailed and systematic study on her view of history and historiography by studying the materials mentioned above.

Second,this book aims to study the historical factuality Virginia Woolf has experienced,which is almost entirely hidden in her works,especially in her novels.This part will study Virginia Woolf's diary entries,letters,biographies,autobiographies,her manuscripts,archival documents to uncover the family history,social history and national history she experienced.

Third,this book deals with how Virginia Woolf narrates her family history,social history and national history she has experienced in her modernist works.This part will adopt the close reading of literary texts to study three novels,To the Lighthouse,Mrs.Dalloway and The Years to explore her strategies of narrating history.

Finally,it comes to study Virginia Woolf's political intention of historiography.Most of her contemporary writers could not express some sensitive discourses because of the cultural taboos and government censorship so that they had to adopt the way of speaking the unspeakable to imply them.The term of power relations in the three novels mentioned above is also the main concern of this book.

The scope of this book covers mainly Virginia Woolf's three novels,To the Lighthouse,Mrs.Dalloway and The Years,two book-length essays,Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own,some shorter fictions,such as“The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”,“A woman's College from Outside”,“Moments of Being: ‘Slater's Pins Have No Points'”,some essays,such as“Why”,“The Leaning Tower”,“The Historian and ‘ The Gibbon'”,“Profession for Women”,“Modern Fiction”and“A Letter to a Young Poet”.Some of her letters,diary entries,biographies,autobiographies,manuscripts,and some relevant archival documents are also covered in this research scope.

The main reason for the author of this book to focus on Virginia Woolf's three modernist works mentioned above is that they are generally accepted as her experimental practice of writing her family history,social history,and national history respectively in her novels.Firstly,Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is regarded as an elegy for lost times and family life to memorize her parents,her brother Thoby Stephen and half-sister Stella Duckworth.She mentioned her plan of writing To the Lighthouse in her diary entry for May 14,1925 when she was on Mrs.Dalloway that“I' m now […] with desire to […] get on to To the Lighthouse.This is going to be fairly short; to have father's character done complete in it; and mother's; and St.Ives; and childhood”(Woolf,D III 18).Secondly,her Mrs.Dalloway could be regarded as a representation of the social history.The end of the First World War witnessed a series of social problems,such as feminist movements,homosexual acts,and class conflict,challenging the dominant conventions and values.As a feminist,lesbian and member of some social societies,Virginia Woolf supported the social movements in her time and criticized the social conventions and values,which could be seen from her modernist novel Mrs.Dalloway.Virginia Woolf showed her political intentions of writing Mrs.Dalloway in her diary entry:“I want to criticize the social system,＆to show it at work,at its most intense”(Woolf,D II 248).Thirdly,Virginia Woolf's The Years could be seen as a novel about the decline of the British Empire ranging from the year“1880”to Present Day”,presumably 1937,during which some historical events took place: the Boer War,the death of Queen Victorian,World War I,the rise of the Labor Party,the General Strike,Irish War of Independence,the coming of the Second World War and the British Union of Fascists.As Thomas S.Davis argues in“The Historical Novel at History's End: Virginia Woolf's The Years”,The Years is Virginia Woolf's“a late modernist version of the historical novel”(Davis 2),in which the Pargiters' everyday history sweeping fifty years represents the decline of the British Empire mainly caused by the colonial independence and two disastrous World Wars.Therefore,this book tries to study how Virginia Woolf represents family history,social history and national history in her three novels; her political intention of narrating history in her own way; the historical forces embedded in the everyday history that decide individuals' daily lives and determine historical courses.

This book proposes to take the New Historicism as the basic research methodology.As a school of literary theory,the New Historicism was first suggested by Stephen Greenblatt in the 1980s and became popular among scholars in 1990s.Stephen Greenblatt and other New Historicists,such as Louis Montrose,Jonathan Dollimore,Hayden White,and Leonard Tennenhouse attempt to establish mutual relation between literature and general culture,arguing that literature does not passively represent historical facts of a particular period but participates in constructing history itself.

Jeffrey Cox and Larry Reynolds state the principal premise of the New Historicism:

For the most part New Historicism can be distinguished from‘old' historicism by its lack of faith in ‘ objectivity' and‘permanence' and its stress not upon the direct recreation of the past,but rather the processes by which the past is constructed or invented…it rejects the idea of ‘History' as a directly accessible,unitary past,and substitutes for it in the conception of ‘ histories',an ongoing series of human constructions,each representing the past at particular present moments for particular present purposes.(Cox and Reynolds 1)

Based on the principal premise of the New Historicism mentioned above,it is clear that the New Historicists favor the diversity of history rather than absolutely objective singular history,argue that history,as a text,is constructed or invented by historians for some particular purposes.As Linden Peach argues in Virginia Woolf,“White,Woolf and Carter all see history as accessible only through partial and partisan narratives in which it is realized”(Peach,Virginia Woolf 4).

The New Historicists break the boundary of history and literature,treat literary history as an expression of the personal,social and national history,and insist on studying literary history in the contexts of personal,social and national history.Thus,this study is enlightened to make an assumption to treat Virginia Woolf's modernist works in the same way with expectation to discover the diversity of voiceless unofficial history and get a better understanding of her strategies and political intention of narrating history in her works.

Along with the family,social and national history,her literary texts reflect power relations determining the historiography.The assumptions about power relations are first proposed by Michel Foucault,who argues that the indefinable power is“everywhere”,“come from everywhere”and pervades every corner of the society.In his works,such as Madness and Civilization,A History of Sexuality,Discipline and Punish,and The Archeology of Knowledge,Michel Foucault claims that the indefinable“social and political power works through the discursive regimes by which social institutions maintain themselves”(Qtd.Selden,Widdowson and Brooker 182).

Stephen Greenblatt,the representative of the New Historicism,claims that his view of the New Historicism is indebted to Michel Foucault's power theory in his“Towards a Poetics of Culture”:“Certainly,the presence of Michel Foucault on the Berkeley campus for extended visits during the last five or six years of his life,and more generally the influence in America of European (and especially French) anthropological and social theorists,has helped to shape my own literary critical practices”(Greenblatt 1).Stephen Greenblatt coins two terms of the New Historicism: subversion and containment.He argues that the subversion is“genuine”,“radical”and“sufficiently disturbing”to the authority,and meanwhile is“contained by the power it would appear to threaten”,namely“the subversiveness is the very product of that power and furthers its ends”(Greenblatt,“Invisible Bullets:Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion”48).

Based on the assumptions of Michel Foucault's power theory and Stephen Greenblatt's terms of subversion and containment,this book aims to study the power relations in Virginia Woolf's three modernist works,To the Lighthouse,Mrs.Dalloway and The Years,to represent history of the“Other”silenced by the official history including the history of women,lower class,the homosexuals,the colonial returned soldiers and administrators,to present how the subversion challenges the authority and how they are contained in the process of subversion.Thus,the New Historicism not only helps this book uncover the suppressed history in her time but shows Virginia Woolf's view on history,historiography,how she transforms history in her real world into history in her fictional world,her strategies of writing history and political commitment of her historiography.