Personal, Novelized, Feminine

The unique style of the critical essays of Virginia Woolf, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, has been attracting increasing recognition from the literary field. The volumes of the two Common Readers, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas have established her fame and success as a literary critic. Although the novels of Virginia Woolf are often seen as the pioneer of the language of modernism, her critical essays express themselves in quite a different way. In other words, the critical essays of Virginia Woolf, distinct from her fiction writing, are shaped into another"Woolfian writing", and therefore the study of their literary and aesthetic values should not be a secondary product of Woolf study.Quite a few critics label Virginia Woolf as"impressionist"when discussing her essays, especially her critical essays. But this expression oversimplifies the stylistic features of her critical essays. This thesis tries to prove, through abundant examples, that Virginia Woolf's critical essays have three major characteristics, which are personal criticism, novelized narrative and female discourse. It focuses on the unique linguistic and structural features of Woolf's critical essays, and on the basis of her corresponding theory and her heritage of traditional British essays, provides a detailed illustration of the performance of these three characteristics in specific texts. This research offers useful academic and professional analysis for the study of Woolf's critical essays, and supports the present tendency in attaching greater significance to the role of her critical essays in British essays of the twentieth century.