By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Solid Objects’ is not as well-known or widely studied as some of Virginia Woolf’s other short stories, such as ‘The Mark on the Wall’ or ‘Kew Gardens’, but it is one of the most consummate statements of her modernist aesthetic.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
In a previous post we attempted a ‘summary’ of ‘In the Orchard’, which is not one of Virginia Woolf’s best-known short stories. But as we observed on Tuesday, it’s one of her most interesting experiments in short fiction because in a sense it’s three versions of the same (very short) story. You can read ‘In the Orchard’ here; below, we offer some notes towards an analysis of the story.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The String Quartet’ was published in Virginia Woolf’s short-story collection Monday or Tuesday in 1921. As we remarked in our summary of the story on Tuesday, it’s one of Woolf’s strongest evocations of music and its links to memory and imagination. You can read ‘The String Quartet’ here before proceeding to our analysis of the story below.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Blue and Green’ is the collective title of two very short sketches Virginia Woolf included in her 1921 collection of short fiction, Monday or Tuesday. On Tuesday (oddly enough), we offered a short summary of these two sketches; now it’s time to attempt some words of analysis. You can read ‘Blue and Green’ in full by clicking on the link to our summary above.
‘Prelude’, the long short story which opens Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 collection Bliss and Other Stories, is a modernist masterpiece. But like much modernist fiction, its meaning and its subtle use of symbolism and other narrative devices are unlikely to be fully apparent after a first, or even a second reading. You can read ‘Prelude’ here; on Tuesday we offered a detailed summary of the ‘plot’ of the story; now, we venture to put down some words of analysis about this story.
Because ‘Prelude’ is a modernist short story, the emphasis is on character rather than plot, as is also often the case with James Joyce’s short stories or Virginia Woolf’s short fiction. Mansfield is using the Burnells’ house-move,