Composing Life : Rooms, Windows and Literary Democracy in Virginia Woolf’s The Years

This thesis considers Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937) in relation to Jacques Rancière’s thinking of the politics of literature. It examines the novel’s different spatial configurations and the relationships it establishes between private and public spaces, home and city, inner and outer. The thesis puts particular emphasis on the novel’s many windows in order to show how they mediate these relationships between different spaces and rooms and how these relationships in turn relate to the political through what the windows present and make visible to the observer and in what way. It also shows how different kinds of spaces in the novel continually open up to their outside. In addition to Rancière’s thinking of the politics of literature in general this thesis also draws on his readings of Woolf in order to establish a dialogue between the two. The thesis reconsiders the prevalent view of the political aspect of the novel and shows how the novel’s politics lies not solely in its tracing of changes in society or its representation of the relationship between private and public spaces, but also in the way it configures sensible experience and its inherent possibilities