An Intertextual Study Of The Hours And Mrs. Dalloway

Michael Cunningham's The Hours has been treated as the contemporary review and revision of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Despite its intertexts with other anterior works such as the diaries and letters of Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and To Room Nineteen, Mrs. Dalloway remains the central source for his fiction. By entitling his novel"The Hours"—one of the titles Woolf considered for her novel in its early stages, Cunningham manipulates Mrs. Dalloway in his"Mrs. Woolf","Mrs. Brown"and"Mrs. Dalloway", either as the three narrative strands or as three major characters. Besides, he expressed his viewpoint about some themes, such as theme of death, response to life, and infused his own conception in some images, like parties and flowers, all of which can be traced back to Woolf's text. In addition, Cunningham also shows his indebtedness as a postmodernist writer to his modernist canon by employing similar techniques such as the technique of stream of consciousness. By adopting and adapting the anterior text in a variety of ways, Cunningham weaves the intertextual elements in his own writing and creates an innovative text.Adopting the theory of intertextuality this thesis is intended to explore the intertextual connection between the two texts and investigate how Cunningham manipulates and transforms the anterior texts and, accordingly, establishes a two-way relationship between himself and Woolf.