Repetition, Remembering, Repetition: Virginia Woolf’s Late Fiction and the Return of War

Abstract

This essay focuses on The Years and Between the Acts and argues that Virginia Woolf’s late style can be understood in part as a response to a sense of historical impasse and to the repetition of war itself that brackets her writing life. The essay works in detail with the signal features of Woolf’s late style: an interest in cliché and repetition on a variety of levels, a fascination with platitudes and outworn formulae, and an apparent determination to mar the rhythms of her sentences.