Virginia woolf's criticism: towards theoretical assumptions on the art of fiction

Resumo

If in her practice as a fiction writer Virginia Woolf wrested the novel form from the prison-house of prevailing rules and onventions, as a literary critic she placed herself in a position that can be defined today as revolutionary. Revolutionary in the sense that her essays, for all their courage and daring, expressed a wilful break from the dominant critical discourse of her time as far as her views on the novel were concerned. In numerous reviews and essays in which she examined ither individual authors or particular literary works, Woolf revealed a deep concern with fiction and rendered her thoughts about what she conceived as being its relation to life, its scope, its form as well as about her notions of character and perspective, notions that obviously grew out of her very own fictional practice.