Conclusion: New Kids on the Virginia Woolf Block

Abstract

A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs Dalloway has examined how the ‘kids on the Virginia Woolf block’¹ have employed the ‘mythical method’,² borrowed and appropriated Woolf’s legacy, and made her Dallowayisms and modernist precepts their own. Mrs Dalloway’s offspring inform us about the source-text — enriching our understanding of it and adding to its accumulated critical reputation³ — as much as about themselves, as contemporary texts that stem from Woolf’s novel and flourish on the present-day literary scene. Thus, the study of Mrs Dalloway’s various literary heirs has enabled me to map their overt or secret genealogy, and trace and assess a number of directions taken in contemporary literary fiction through the prism of Woolf’s novel. Although literary critics have endeavoured to identify general trends in contemporary fiction in terms of subject matter and formal techniques,⁴ my aim here was more specific, insofar as I have looked primarily at one canonical text and delineated its subsequent lineages and linkages.