The Stories of Hours: The Reconfigured Texts in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham's The Hours

Abstract

This essay is derived from one of the case studies comprising in ”Intertextuality and Feminism in Postmodern Fiction”, a graduate course that the present writer offered at Fall Semester of the 2000(superscript th) Academic Year in the Graduate Institute of English Literature at Chinese Culture University^1. Our discussions focused largely on what David Cowart calls ”host” and ”guest” texts, and with somewhat greater emphasis on the dynamics of contemporary literary renewal. Michael Cunningham's The Hours was chosen to be included in the seven postmodern fictions researched and lectured in the very semester because the lecturer of this course was invited to write an annotated preface to the Chinese translation edition of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, the ”host text” of The Hours, when the ”guest text” itself was awarded the 1999(superscript th) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction^2. The present study examines the reconfigured texts in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours in the base of David Cowart's theories and reveals the three women's stories of hours that display the fundamental solitude in the face of disaster and despair.