ABSTRACT
Light pastiche is taken to a new level by Robin Lippincott and Michael Cunningham, whose novels are examined in Chapter 6, ‘Biofictive Mirrors: Clarissa Woolf/Virginia Dalloway’. Mr Dalloway (1999) and The Hours (1998) display the authors’ extraordinary Woolfian narrative virtuosity and technical artistry. This chapter prolongs the previous chapter’s reflections on ventriloquism and simulacra of geneses, as Cunningham fictionalises the creative process of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. His Virginia is covered ‘very remarkably’ with Woolf herself: she is not only made from Woolf’s authentic auto/biographical sources, but also with bits and pieces of her characters. Both Lippincott and Cunningham borrow fragments from Woolf’s life as well as her stylistic palette and modernist tools and Dalloway-ise their Virginias. Through these creative responses to Woolf’s canonical novel, this chapter addresses questions about the inscription of the past in the present and about appropriating and recontextualising previous works in new literary and cultural realms with specific gender, sexuality and political issues that reflect our current contemporary concerns.
