30 pages • 1 hour read
Virginia WoolfModern Fiction
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1925A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Allusion
The central literary device within Woolf’s essay is allusion—a reference to another writer, work, event, et cetera. By the second sentence of the essay, Woolf has referenced two authors besides herself: Henry Fielding and Jane Austen. Other writers populating “Modern Fiction” include Bennett, Wells, Hardy, Joyce, and Chekhov.
While allusions are often implied, Woolf’s are direct and frequent. Such references underline Woolf’s understanding of her subject matter (and therefore her qualification to discuss it) and illustrate her points. Without reference to Chekhov, for example, the essay’s discussion of Russian fiction would be vague. Woolf intends her essay to be a well-evidenced treatise, not one woven together from stray thoughts.
Woolf’s allusions also place her criticism—and by implication her work—within a busy field of writers and literary figures. One effect is to underline the many ways in which she suggests tradition must be done away with: Each subsequent reference adds to the pile of tired, Victorian writers who press down on the modern writer with the heavy weight of tradition.
Metaphor/Extended Metaphor
Woolf is one of Modernism’s most famous employers of metaphor: a comparison of two things that are not literally alike. In this essay, she constructs a number of metaphors to illustrate her arguments about fiction. The depiction of Bennett’s work as a well-crafted building is one such metaphor, as is the image of the reader of “Gusev” as someone attempting to make out objects in a dark room.
Woolf’s most important metaphors are the extended metaphors that describe how the modern author might experience the world—as “myriad” impressions” and a “shower of innumerable atoms” (160). These many-layered metaphors attempt to universalize an experience that, Woolf herself argues, is almost entirely unique and individual.
Rhetorical Questions
Woolf’s frequent and varied rhetorical questions—questions that lack explicit answers—occur throughout her essay and serve different purposes. Some express dismay, as when she asks, “[I]f life should refuse to live there?” of Bennett’s impeccably constructed novels (158). Others make complex theoretical points while allowing Woolf to avoid didacticism, as when she asks, “Does not the inferiority of [Wells’s characters] natures tarnish whatever intuitions and ideals may be provided for them by the generosity of their creator?” (159). Some questions seem simply to mark out Woolf’s arguments and encourage readers onward, as when she asks, “What is the point of it all?” (159).
Most significantly, Woolf’s rhetorical questions aim to persuade the reader that they are desperate for the answers Woolf appears to be. Woolf wants the reader too to ask, “Must novels be like this?” (160).
Irony
Irony is a literary device that involves a discrepancy between expectations and reality. It is a hallmark of Modernism, including Woolf’s nonfiction prose, where it is sometimes as simple as saying the opposite of what she means. For example, when Woolf contends that “the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it” (161), she employs deliberate understatement: She believes that the “proper stuff” is in fact far other than “custom would have us believe,” and the irony draws attention to the gap.
Irony also appears in Woolf’s description of Fielding’s and Austen’s “simple tools and primitive materials” (257), which appears to place these two 19th-century authors in a far more distant past. Woolf likewise uses irony when she says she makes “no claim to stand, even momentarily” on high ground from which literature can be viewed and analyzed (157). In fact, the entire essay represents an attempt to stand on this “high ground.”
Related Titles
By Virginia Woolf
