Compilation of Critical Notes on “An Unwritten Novel”
Fox, Stephen D. “’An Unwritten Novel’ and a Hidden
Protagonist.” Virginia Woolf Quarterly
4, 1973: 69-77.
Fleishman, Avrom, "Forms
of the Woolfian Short Story." 44-71
in Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, ed. Ralph Freeman (1980).
57 “form of serial
presentation, with a significant final term.”
“the movement from novelistic
imaginings to the hard kernel of reality is paralleled by the movement of the
train which carries the observer and the observed”
We might consider this an example of
parallel linear form, in which the spatial sequence and the perceptual sequence
move along together to a joint arrival.
Davenport, Tony. "The
Life of 'Monday or Tuesday." Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, ed.
Clements and Grundy. (1983): 157-75.
Marcus, Jane. “Taking the Bull by the Udders: Sexual
Difference in Virginia Woolf—a Conspiracy Theory.” Virginia
Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: IUP, 1987. 137-62.
Dick, Susan. "Chasms in the Continuity of Our Way: Jacob's Room." Chapter Two of Virginia Woolf. London &
New York: Edward Arnold, 1989.
Head, Domininic. The Modernist Short Story. Cambridge UP, 1992.
85 “Woolf here
uses The Times as an obvious symbol
of factual and ordered descriptive writing -- (’births, deaths, marriage, Court
Circular, the habits of birds, ….) -- which compromises an obstacle between the
writer and human nature.
Staveley, Alice. “Voicing Virginia: The Monday or
Tuesday Years” pp. 262-67 IN: Daugherty,
Beth Rigel (ed.); Barrett, Eileen (ed.) Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts. New
York: Pace UP; 1996.
Séllei, Nóra. “The Snail And ‘The
Times’: Three Stories "Dancing In Unity." Hungarian Journal
of English and American Studies (HJEAS) 3.2 [BRITISH STUDIES ISSUE] (1997):
189-198 (UwN 192-4)
Deals
with the story in the usual vein of it being a revelation of the failed attempt
to create character with no evidence in the “written novel”, but incorporates the
idea that the “unwritten novel” about the narrator’s mind celebrates her
affirmative choice to continue to create in the face of the inevitable
epistemoloical gap between subject and object (194).
192 “the
narrator, obviously Woolf’s persona
193 Newspaper
“functions as a symbol of self-evident conclusions, of ready-made truth, of
facts served daily as life, as a repository of the essence of existence”
“The
times and life are considered each others correlatives, but ultimately they are
essentially contrasted. … the story of
life as constructed by the the Times is constantly invaded, torn open, and
defeated by the other story of life, by the story of the womenan. …newspaper “is presented in military
metaphors, as something which tries, in vain, to defend its own truth” (quotes shield passage)
Lojo Rodríguez, Laura María “Parody and Metafiction: Virginia Woolf's 'An Unwritten Novel'.”Links and Letters, 2001; 8: 71-81. ILL 8/29/15
72 “a short piece which parodies realism by laying bare the functioning of its conventions while opening the way to new fictional modes of understanding literature.”
73 “Woolf rejected the literary forms that corresponded to this ordered reality, such as the emphasis on plot, causal relationships and authoritative omniscience”
74 a metafictional narrative that “draws attention to itself and to its process of construction, which is openly made visible and self-reflecting” “explores a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction.”
75 title of “UnWN” “suggests the process of story-telling rather that emphasizing the story itself”
“Ironically, all the situations and background which make up Minnie’s life draw from worn out realistic conventions and constitute a parody of them”
76 “There is a long connection in Virginia Woolf’s writing btw fiction-making and train-journeying, which invariably becomes an image of it” “Byron and Mrs. Briggs” (1922) “Character in fiction” (1923) and “Mr B and Mrs B” (1924).
77 n. 6 “Hilda, is, ironicaly enough, the name of one of Arnold Bennett’s most famous heroines”
Levy, Michelle. “Virginia Woolf's Shorter Fictional Explorations of the External World: 'Closely
United … Immensely Divided'.” pp. 139-55 IN: Benzel,
Kathryn N. (ed. and introd.); Hoberman, Ruth (ed. and introd.); Dick, Susan
(foreword) Trespassing Boundaries:
Virginia Woolf's Short Fiction. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan; 2004.
139 used short stories “her most
sustained exploration of the human relation to the external world..
140 MWà man and snail assert “independent existence of
the external world’
143 SYMPà
Skrbic, Nena. Wild Outbursts of Freedom: Reading Virginia
Woolf's Short Fiction Westport, CT: Praeger; 2004.
40 UN “built on a sense of lost stories
and histories” Takes us on a trip thru the mind “speculation about the
significance of knowledge.”
“story foregrounds the realization that knowledge
is not absolute… metaphor of portraiture introduced at the start…. People in
train are all reticent, shut in. “We are
back in Plato’s cave, trying
to discover the world through out own illusions”
41 “Woolf raises skepticism about the
legitimacy of the writer’s attempt ata creative solution to the paradox between
realism and definition”
story is a series of “false starts”
“decision to emphasize rather than conceal all the
structural elements” [of the story] serves to underline the notion of
unanswerability”
sees “dot, dot, dots” as painting as story… “how a canvasas is constructed of colored
dots..”
“The resulting narrative shows a character that is
not allowed to present itself coherently”
author is “no longer in a privileged position:..
“endow the story with a n element of voteurism, paranoi and fear of exposure”
42 “opposition btw being in transit and
never going anywhere”
uses “body language as a nonverbal structuring
element” sees this also as a painterly strategy.. sees twitches etc. as
“moments of definitive transparency”
171 question is UN is “about mirroring a
psychological truth back to the reader or are they ultimately meditations on
the various construction of representation?”
“the Woolfian short story often offers only the
allure of a potential narrative”
Briggs, Julia. ‘Our
Press Arrived On Tuesday’: Monday Or
Tuesday (1921).” Chapter 3 of Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. London: Penguin[Allen Lane] 2005. 58-83.
58 “Mod
Fiction” “no plot, little probability
and a vague general confusion in which the clear-cut features of the tragic,
the comic, the passionate, and the lyrical were dissolved beyond the
possibility of separate recognition”
60 decision
to buy printing press
61 MoW
“visionary monologue on the nature of perception” … “It follows a train or flow
of though, yet the movement of thought and feeling is also its subject.”
Thinker
“contrast this flux of though and memory with the external, regulated world of
common assumptions and social expectations”
62 LETTER
OF July 24, 1917 to Cline: “its high
time we found some new shapes dont you think so?”
63 Katherine
Mansfield. Garsington.. “A kind of, musically speaking—conversation
set to flowers”
64 “Three
Jews” also set in Kew Gardens
66 alternation
of human conversations with vegetable world of flower bed
68 VW’s
short stories “examples of the ‘unrepresentational art’” Vanessa’s abandonment of surface realism
“concentrate on the impact of form and structure on painting”
70 idea
of “significant from”
71 democratization
of experience of art
72 modernist
concentration on the world lived inside the mind.. concentrate on act of
thinking/writing, like visible brushstokes
73 joyce’s
Ulysses – indecency
74 TSE
– boy’s club.. Hogarth Press.
75 female
modernists: Dorothy Richrdson (‘stream of consciousness”)
76 exploitation
of flights of fancy “railway game” of
attributing character on basis of appearance.
77 UwN
“voices an implicit protest against fiction that simplifies and sums up human
being, regarding them as primariy the product of their circumstances”
“evocation
of suburban life parodies the popular novelist Arnold Bennett.”
79 MoT:
Haunted House,
A Society”
A Society”
80 depressed
at praise for Lyton’s Queen Victoria
81 new
edition of Kew in 1927—NOT WOODCUTS.
Adrian
Hunter. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English… 2007.
69 “’AUWN’
can be read as a narrative of the decisive turn in Woolf’s own career”
Prudente, Teresa. “To Slip
Easily from One Thing to Another': Experimentalism and Perception in Woolf's Short Stories.” Journal
of the Short Story in English, 2008 Spring; 50: 171-183.
Reynier, Christine. “The 'Obstinate Resistance' of
Woolf’s Short Story.” Journal of the Short Story in English, 2008 Spring; 50: 2-5.
Reynier,
Christine. Virginia Woolf's
Ethics of the Short Story. Palgrave
Macmillan (August 18, 2009).
Huculak, Matthew “Meddling Middlebrows: Virginia Woolf and
the London Mercury.”Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 2009
Fall-Winter; 76: 16-18.
Levy, Heather. The
Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction. NY: Peter Land, 2010.
