Moving Tropes: New Modernist Travels with Virginia Woolf. - Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics

Moving Tropes: New Modernist Travels with Virginia Woolf.

By Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics

  • Release Date: 2001-01-01
  • Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines

Description

The article concentrates on one of Virginia Woolf's profoundly lyrial novels, Mrs. Dallowav, to question the dominant acceptance of Woolf's British rootedness and lack of wanderlust. Through a close reading and analysis of pertinent passages, the article shows how Woolf was not simply experimenting with forms, but also pushing forward in her tropes movement across borders and travel. Every character in the novel is somehow related to a foreign place. The domestic dimension of this novel, stressed for so long, is problematized to give way to a fresh view of Woolf as more transnational than appears. The article calls on recent works in anthropological and feminist criticism related to boundary crossing to throw light on Woolf's text. The study draws parallels between movement of characters in London and the rhetoric of travel indicated or subsumed in the lyricism of the text. Even in shop windows gazed at by the protagonist in the novel, global relations of power are inscribed, destabilizing the stasis of home and creating metaphoric hybridity. **********

Comments