Virginia Woolf and Metonymic Realism: Making It New?

Abstract

Ezra Pound’s injunction to ‘Make it New’ seems still to encapsulate the consensual critical view of literary modernism’s aesthetic imperative.1 Although recent research has comprehensively demonstrated the engagement of modernist writers with the social issues of their day, there has been little interrogation of the prevailing assumption that modernism is characterised by its rejection of past forms, especially realism. Woolf criticism, certainly, seems caught in this historiographical inertia, despite the recent focus upon the cultural contexts of her writing.2 Linden Peach, in his illuminating study of Woolf’s historical perspective (2000), reiterates the prevailing orthodoxy: ‘The Years, despite its apparent concessions to social realism, … can be seen in terms of her quarrel with realism in her essay “Modern Fiction” (1919).’ For Peach, Woolf’s work is anti-realist in that it is ‘located at the very juncture between deconstruction and New Historicism’.3