Virginia Woolf critical quotes

Question 1

V Woolf, Modern Fiction - on ‘gratitudes and hostilities’

Answer 1

‘it is for the literary historian to decide…we only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us’

Role of the writer is to write not commentate?
Impossibility of analysing own cultural moment - does not pretend towards impartial omniscience

Question 2

V Woolf, Modern Fiction - what does she react against?

Answer 2

The ‘materialists…concerned not with the spirit but with the body…they write of unimportant things…making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring’

Question 3

V Woolf, Modern Fiction - the writer’s entrampment

Answer 3

‘‘if the writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose…there would be no plot…’

Question 4

V Woolf, Modern Fiction - what does Woolf call for writers to display?

Answer 4

‘consciousness’ alone with ‘as little mixture of the alien and external [of societal constructions?] as possible’

Question 5

V Woolf, Modern Fiction - what does Woolf praise Russian writers for and why?

Answer 5

‘the inconclusiveness of the Russian mind…the sense that there is no answer…[life is] hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be with a resentful, despair’

Question 6

V Woolf, Modern Fiction - what does Woolf forbid, and what not?

Answer 6

‘nothing – no ‘method’, no experiment, even the wildest – is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence’

Question 7

V Woolf, Modern Fiction - what is the ‘proper stuff of fiction’

Answer 7

‘Everything is the proper stuff of fiction’

Question 8

What does Jane Marcus claim?

Answer 8

Woolf was a “guerilla fighter in a Victorian skirt” for whom writing was “a revolutionary act”