VIRGINIA WOOLF & LIT ENGLISH REN C

This book examines the profound effect on a major critic and novelist of the twentieth century of the period of English literature's greatest glory the Renaissance. Beginning in the sixteenth century with the poems and plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and with prose writings such as Hakluyt's Voyages and continuing through the great lyric poets of the seventeenth century the Renaissance influenced every aspect of Virginia Woolf's work. Allher available writing - letters diaries reading-notes drafts of essays and novels and feminist polemic - are explored in this illuminating study of Virginia Woolf's varied reactions to the period and its impact on her fiction and criticism. Each of the novels in particular is shown to integrate someelement of Renaissance literature in its language characterization and often structure enriching the fiction; thus this study deepens our understanding of Woolf's creative process and our enjoyment of the works.