Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf: Life and Death of Modern Novel

Abstract

The aftermath of the First World War challenges diverse human practices and literature is no exception. What literary writing is, what it is like to work upon the material for composition that derives from a fragmented world and what the status of the poet is are some of the questions Modernist literature poses to undermine the representation modes of Modern Realism, whose most precious form is the novel, which in England consolidates in the 18th century. Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf, echoes these arguments by bestowing upon her prose the categories of sex and gender. This literary proposal consists in destabilizing the prosaic linearity of the novel and endowing it with a semiotic language, suggestive in nature and traditionally associated with women, which subverts the marginal space where they have been displaced and turns it into a fertile ground for writing.