Abstract
This chapter focuses on Michael Cunningham’s engagement with Virginia Woolf’s life and work in his novel The Hours (1998). Through an analysis of Cunningham’s transnational transposition of the plot of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and the fictionalisation of Woolf herself, this chapter proposes that The Hours presents certain thematic concerns that are integral to Cunningham’s identity as an American writer, namely the smudging of the boundaries between fiction and reality and the conceptualisation of world-building in extratextual terms. Moreover, this chapter argues that world-building is a key motif for the critical reading of American identity grounded in the artificial discourses of a world created by real-life narratives towards the end of the twentieth century, very much as Woolf had suggested in 1925, when Mrs Dalloway was published.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Barth, John. 1984. ‘Tales Within Tales within Tales’. In The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction, pp. 218–38. New York: Putnam.
Beerman, Jessica. 2017. ‘Transnational Modernisms’. In The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, edited by Yogita Goyal, pp. 107–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 2010. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited and translated by Randal Johnson. London: Polity.
Broad, Charlotte. 2009. ‘Crecer, desplegarse y florecer: De La Señora Dalloway a Las horas’. In La idea en busca de su abrigo: Ensayos sobre la obra de Virginia Woolf, edited by Charlotte Broad and Claudia Lucotti, pp. 67–111. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Carr, Helen. 2010. ‘Virginia Woolf, Empire and Race’. In The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2nd ed., edited by Susan Sellers, pp. 197–213. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. 2010. ‘Virginia Woolf and the Public Sphere’. In The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2nd ed., edited by Susan Sellers, pp. 231–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cunningham, Michael. 1998. The Hours. New York: Picador.
Cunningham, Michael. 2019. ‘Michael Cunningham on the Novel That Would Become Mrs Dalloway’. Literary Hub, July 15. Accessed 25 August 2019. https://lithub.com/michael-cunningham-on-the-novel-that-would-become-mrs-dalloway-2/.
Deane, Seamus. 1995. ‘Imperialism/Nationalism’. In Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd ed., edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, pp. 354–68. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. 2017. ‘Unsettling American Literature, Rethinking Nation and Empire’. In The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, edited by Yogita Goyal, pp. 19–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Goldman, Jane. 2006. ‘1925, London, New York, Paris: Metropolitan Modernisms—Parallax and Palimpsest’. In The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English, edited by Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson, pp. 61–72. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Goyal, Yogita. 2017. ‘Introduction: The Transnational Turn’. In The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, edited by Yogita Goyal, pp. 1–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2002. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. In Off the Beaten Track, edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, pp. 1–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hughes, Mary Joe. 2004. ‘Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Postmodern Artistic Re-presentation’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 45, no. 4 (July 1): 349–61.
Levenson, Michael. 2011. ‘Introduction’. In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, 2nd ed., edited by Michael Levenson, pp. 1–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marcus, Laura. 2010. ‘Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf’. In The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2nd ed., edited by Susan Sellers, pp. 142–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge.
Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge.
Sellers, Susan. 2010. ‘Introduction’. In The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2nd ed., edited by Susan Sellers, pp. xix–xxi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spohrer, Erika. 2005. ‘Seeing Stars: Commodity Stardom in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway’. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 61, no. 2: 114–32.
Wallace, David Foster. 1997 [1990]. ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’. In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, pp. 21–82. New York: Back Bay.
Woolf, Virginia. 1924. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, Virginia. 1947 [1925]. ‘American Fiction’. In The Moment and Other Essays, pp. 94–104. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, Virginia. 1966 [1926]. ‘The Cinema’. In Collected Essays, vol. 2, pp. 268–72. London: The Hogarth Press.
Woolf, Virginia. 1982. A Writer’s Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf. San Diego: Harcourt.
Woolf, Virginia. 1984 [1925]. ‘Modern Fiction’. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4 (1925–1928), edited by Andrew McNeillie, pp. 157–65. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, Virginia. 2004 [1925]. Mrs Dalloway. London: Vintage.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jiménez, M. (2020). The Hours and the Nations: Virginia Woolf’s Life and Art in Michael Cunningham’s America. In: Rensen, M., Wiley, C. (eds) Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-45199-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-45200-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)