Post-Impressionism and Virginia Woolf's Experimentation with Literary Forms

Virginia Woolf as one of the leading figures of modernist literature was in pursuit of challenging the so-called limitations of form in fiction. Triggered by the intellectual discussions in the Bloomsbury Group, formed by a group of intellectuals and artists in England, she attempted to redefine literary form by reorganizing her fiction to oppose the painters in the group who believed that literary form is restricted because of the nature of language. Influenced by her discussions with post-impressionist artists such as Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell and Roger Fry, Woolf acknowledged that artistic creativity is intermingled by “a myriad impressions” of an “ordinary mind on an ordinary day” with its own peculiarities and dissonances. Similarly, post-impressionism rejects objectivity as a necessity in realist painting and embraces spiritualism and personality in artistic expression. Knowing that literature is not solely composed of abstract ideas, Woolf even tested new printing techniques. In her novels, not only content and narrative techniques but also the norms regarding physical organization of a book are challenged. Therefore, Woolf greyed the lines between form and content by rendering the book itself as a fragmented material. Consequently, this paper aims to discuss Woolf’s experimentalism in her selected works as a modernist attempt to blur the borders of the two edging literary components—form and content—by looking into the influences of post-impressionist art on her fiction