Full title · Mrs. Dalloway

author · Virginia Woolf

type of work · Novel

genre · Modernist; formalist; feminist

language · English

time and place written · Woolf began Mrs. Dalloway in Sussex in 1922 and completed the novel in London in 1924.

date of first publication · May 14, 1925

publisher · Hogarth Press, the publishing house by Leonard and Virginia Woolf

narrator · Anonymous. The omniscient narrator is a commenting voice who knows everything about the characters. This voice appears occasionally among the subjective thoughts of characters. The critique of Sir William Bradshaw’s reverence of proportion and conversion is the narrator’s most sustained appearance.

point of view · Point of view changes constantly, often shifting from one character’s stream of consciousness (subjective interior thoughts) to another’s within a single paragraph. Woolf most often uses free indirect discourse, a literary technique that describes the interior thoughts of characters using third-person singular pronouns (he and she). This technique ensures that transitions between the thoughts of a large number of characters are subtle and smooth.

tone · The narrator is against the oppression of the human soul and for the celebration of diversity, as are the book’s major characters. Sometimes the mood is humorous, but an underlying sadness is always present.

tense · Though mainly in the immediate past, Peter’s dream of the solitary traveler is in the present tense.

setting (time) · A day in mid-June, 1923. There are many flashbacks to a summer at Bourton in the early 1890s, when Clarissa was eighteen.

setting (place) · London, England. The novel takes place largely in the affluent neighborhood of Westminster, where the Dalloways live.

protagonist · Clarissa Dalloway

major conflict · Clarissa and other characters try to preserve their souls and communicate in an oppressive and fragmentary post–World War I England.

rising action · Clarissa spends the day organizing a party that will bring people together, while her double, Septimus Warren Smith, eventually commits suicide due to the social pressures that oppress his soul.

climax · At her party, Clarissa goes to a small room to contemplate Septimus’s suicide. She identifies with him and is glad he did it, believing that he preserved his soul.

falling action · Clarissa returns to her party and is viewed from the outside. We do not know whether she will change due to her moment of clarity, but we do know that she will endure.

themes · Communication vs. privacy; disillusionment with the British Empire; the fear of death; the threat of oppression

motifs · Time; Shakespeare; trees and flowers; waves and water

symbols · The prime minister; Peter Walsh’s pocketknife and other weapons; the old woman in the window; the old woman singing an ancient song

full title · Brave New World

author · Aldous Huxley

type of work · Novel

genre · Dystopia

language · English

time and place written · 1931, England

date of first publication · 1932

publisher · Chatto and Windus, London

narrator · Third-person omniscient; the narrator frequently makes passages of “objective” description sound like the speech- or thought-patterns of a particular character, using a technique usually called “free indirect quotation”

climax · John incites a riot in the hospital in Chapter 15

protagonists · Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson, and John

antagonist · Mustapha Mond

settings (time) · 2540 a.d.; referred to in the novel as 632 years “After Ford,” meaning 632 years after the production of the first Model T car

settings (place) · England, Savage Reservation in New Mexico

point of view · Narrated in the third person, primarily from the point of view of Bernard or John but also from the point of view of Lenina, Helmholtz Watson, and Mustapha Mond

falling action · Chapter 18, in which John isolates himself in a lighthouse and punishes himself; it ends with an orgy and his suicide

tense · Past

tone · Satirical, ironic, silly, tragic, juvenile, pedantic

themes · The use of technology to control society, the incompatibility of happiness and truth, the dangers of an all-powerful state

motifs · Alienation, sex, Shakespeare

symbols · “The bottle” as a symbol of conditioning and social predestination; soma as a manifestation of the use of technology to control society and the promotion of happiness over truth

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 912