Abstract

Virginia Woolf's involvement with the visual arts was a complex and varied one. Her friendship with the leading English art critic Roger Fry and her membership in the Bloomsbury Group meant that she was a first-hand witness to the furor wrought by the introduction of the European Post-Impressionists to England in 1910 and 1912. As both her public and private writings demonstrate, the visual arts remained a pervasive influence on Woolf all her life. This thesis argues that Woolf's exposure to Post-Impressionism through her privileged intellectual position within the avant-garde cultural milieu resulted in a literary aesthetic which is distinctly Cubist. The comparison between Woolf and the Cubist aesthetic will be seen to take place on a number of levels: structural, ideological and descriptive. Proceeding from a major discussion of background and method which takes into account both the ideological framework of the Cubist movements and critical definitions of "literary Cubism" per se, I apply Cubist readings to four novels: Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, Between the Acts and To the Lighthouse. I also examine a number of Woolf's short stories. These works are discussed insofar as they relate to major themes relevant to a Cubist aesthetic such as Impressionism, Analytic versus Synthetic Cubism, concepts of time and space and issues of language and reflexivity