Knowra The Waves The Waves A 1931 novel by Virginia Woolf, composed of soliloquies by six characters whose lives unfold from childhood to old age. Interludes describing the changing light over the sea frame their voices.
Soliloquy : A speech in which a character expresses thoughts aloud, often without addressing another character. The novel’s six voices speak in extended, inward monologues.
Modernist literature : A body of literature that experiments with form and perspective amid the disruptions of modern life. The Waves is a major example of modernist experimentation with narrative form.
Virginia Woolf : An English modernist writer whose novels, essays, and diaries shaped twentieth-century literature. She wrote and published The Waves in 1931.
Bernard (The Waves) : One of the six speakers in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a character drawn to storytelling and social performance. His changing accounts of himself make narration itself a subject of the novel.
Experimental literature : Literature that deliberately tests or departs from established conventions of form, language, or narrative. Its blend of monologue, repetition, and poetic interludes models formal experimentation.
Stream of consciousness : A literary technique that represents the flow of a character’s thoughts, perceptions, and associations. The soliloquies move through memory and sensation rather than conventional dialogue.
Novel : A long work of prose fiction that depicts characters and events through an extended narrative. Woolf reshapes the novel’s usual reliance on scenes, dialogue, and plot.
The Common Reader : A two-volume collection of Virginia Woolf’s literary essays, published in 1925 and 1932. Its essays reveal Woolf’s critical interests during the period when she developed the novel.
Rhoda (The Waves) : One of the six speakers in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, often portrayed as alienated from ordinary social life. Her soliloquies give the novel a voice markedly unlike Bernard’s social fluency.
The Years : A 1937 novel by Virginia Woolf that follows the Pargiter family across several decades. Woolf’s next novel returned to family and historical time in a more conventional narrative form.
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