Inheritance And Development

Michael Cunningham is an American post-modernist writer. His novel, TheHours, published in1998, was chosen as a Best Book of the same year by The NewYork Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and such. It then received the PulitzerPrized for Fiction the ensuing year.Inspired and deeply influenced by Woolf, Cunningham inherits and develops thetheory of Androgyny in The Hours, furnishing it with new and more profoundorientations: he practices the idea himself that androgyny is the ideal state forprofessional writing; he also explains that androgyny is the ideal attitude and way oflife. This thesis firstly examines the theoretical basis of and comments on the conceptof androgyny. And then it studies Cunningham’s inheritance and development ofWoolf’s idea of androgyny, focusing on the main three female characters in TheHours.