ABSTRACT
To claim that Virginia Woolf is a poet who used prose fiction as her medium is to assert something both about the content and about the form of her novels. It does, however, focus on a specific poetic quality or aspect in each novel under discussion as a starting point for interpretation. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents a stylistic study of the fiction of Virginia Woolf; or one which focuses narrowly on the lyric qualities of her writing. The major fiction is approached in a more narrowly specific way: Mrs. Dalloway through its poetic rhythms, To the Lighthouse as a multi-perspectival exploration of a reality embodied in a single image, and The Waves as a playpoem. A new kind of poetry is to be found in the last novel. The aim is to move away from the general view of Woolf as a psychological novelist.
