Abstract
This chapter sketches out a thesis about “strangeness” or “weirdness” in Virginia Woolf's fiction, particularly in the middle period of her writing. It suggests that Woolf's fiction is “weird” in the (mostly) honorific sense of weird associated in particular with twentieth-century narrative experimentation. In this usage the word weird gestures toward effects on the reader like undecidability, disorientation, and instability. Mrs. Dalloway is not weird in the sense that it plays with epistemological or ontological uncertainty, for instance raising questions of plot like “What is the real story here?” Rather, the chapter proposes that this and other middle-period novels by Woolf traffic in affective uncertainty, which leaves readers unclear how to feel about—or “take”—narrative descriptions and utterances, and ultimately events and characters.
Published Version
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