On Woolf's New Biography Experiment

Virginia Woolf is one of the greatest British writers in the twentieth Century.Through her limited life,she created a large number of not only far-reaching but also classical works which include novels,diaries,prose,informal essays and so on.Because Woolf clings to explore the art of various literary writing,she has also created many biographical works,Orlando:A Biography and Flush:A Biography are the experimental character,and the absurd and bizarre writing style completely deviates from traditional biographies.Based on these two biographies,this paper attempts to discuss the deconstruction and subversion of Woolf's experimental biographic creation to traditional biography.The paper is mainly carried out from the following aspects:The introduction part first analyzes Woolf's whole thought of writings,that is,exploring new artistic forms and skills which breaks away from the traditional mode.It is shown in his experimental biographic writing that Woolf has added the artistic skill to her writing of small talk and realized the biography on the basis of insisting on the distinguishing character of biographical style to realize the innovation of the biographic literary form.Meanwhile,her "new biography" theory has also given a new direction for the writing of modern biographies.Finally,based on summarizing the researches at home and abroad,the main theses of this paper are put forward.The first chapter mainly discusses the motivation of Woolf's biographic writing.As an assiduous literary experimenter,Woolf's achievements are not only reflected in novels and literary reviews,but also in her biography.On the one hand,Woolf's passion for biography stems from the educational pattern given by his father which deviates from the traditional education.This education pattern fostered Woolf's interest in biography and also inspired her to become a writer;on the other hand,she was consciousness of rebellion find the sense of spiritual belonging and contributed to her new writing concept.The second chapter focuses on highlighting the literariness of Woolf's biographic works Orlando:A Biography and Flush:A Biography.Traditional biographies are usually too rigid historical materials,but most of them are boring and trivial,losing their deserved attraction.Under these circumstances,as a representative of the "new biography",Woolf appealed for the"artistic consciousness" of biography with his own experimental creation,which highlighted the literary characteristics of biography and promoted the transformation of modern Western Biographies.In these two biographies,with her absurd imagination,the pursuit of the true feeling of the biographical master,and the style of "postmodernism" which full of banter and rebellion,Woolf deconstructs the authority of the traditional biography and completely subverts the form and content of biography.The third chapter mainly discusses the narrative art of Woolfs new biography.Out of the search for the inner world of the characters,Woolf devoted herself to the introspection of the literature itself and excavation of human deep consciousness both in the novel and in the biography which made Woolf use the narrative skills that deviated from the traditional biography in her writing biography.These performed in several aspects:on the basis of the indirect acceptance the influences of Bergson's "psychological time",Woolf integrates his own unique"psychological time" and "cosmic time" into biography,realizing the deconstruction of the linear narrative of the single-track dimension of the traditional biography,and the diversity of the narrative angle,which combines the Woolf's complicated thinking of human being and also subverts the omniscient narrative pattern that traditional biography has always used.The conclusion is a summary of the whole text.Woolfs new biography is full of deep exploration of the mind world of the characters which makes Woolf devotes to the development of a new biography art,which has some enlightenment to the modern biography.At the same time,it is pointed out that Woolfs extreme experimental works can not represent the mainstream of biographical development.