On "The Spirit Of The Age" In Orlando: A Biography

Since Orlando:A Biography, a work by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), was published in 1928, criticisms has been relatively singular. Most of the critics considered it as a companion volume to A Room of One s Own and focused on "androgyny" to analyze Woolf's political and aesthetic theories upon feminism; meanwhile, only a small group of critics focused on the literary type of the work to distill the modernistic traits.This thesis, based on a close textual analysis, after exploring the historical facts in the novel and studying Woolf's unique understanding of biography, holds that the work actually echoes Woolf's thinking about "the spirit of the age". To appreciate this within an allover vista, this thesis starts out from a macro point of view and analyses in four aspects:the literary inheritance of Orlando:A Biography, different "spirits of the ages" distinguished in separate chapters of the work, reflections upon "androgyny" and feministic concerns upon different types of narration in the work, and the definitions of truth of fact and truth of fiction revealed in the "new biography"This thesis concludes that those historical elements revived by Woolf's pen and feminist concerns such as "androgyny" demonstrate "the spirit of the age" from the respect of contents while the biographical style interprets "the spirit of the age" from the respect of Woolf's artistic philosophy. Behind "the spirit of the age" stands the cohesive harmony between the subject and the object in literature—the eternal interaction between literature creation and human history.