ABSTRACT
In 1936, in the first English monograph on Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby observes Woolf’s deep interest ‘in the odd behaviour of time in the individual consciousness’. 1 In the ensuing years, Woolf’s temporal experiments have been the inspiration for a large body of critical work, which has been remarkably fruitful in generating myriad insights and perspectives on Woolf’s texts. Her presence is uncontested in two seminal twentieth-century works on time: Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (1983) and Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (1985). Kern, recognising Woolf’s compression of ‘successive experiences into a single heightened moment’, aligns her with Proust. 2 This disruption of externally imposed chronology is part of modernist efforts at resisting the increasingly standardised and regularised time of modernity. Bradbury and McFarlane identified in the modernist novel the liberation of narrative from linear plots dictated by ‘logical and progressive order’. 3 This refiguring of time in narrative is part of modernism’s resistance of conventional beginning, middle and end, that involves ‘getting on from lunch to dinner’, and which inevitably subverts private experiences of time to clock time. Woolf is central to this characterising of the movement, and the temporal qualities of her texts have therefore attracted much critical attention.
