Popis: |
Virginia Woolf provides a centrepiece for this book, and this chapter shows how the trajectory of her fictional oeuvre dovetails suggestively with the course of Irish history from the Home Rule crisis to the Civil War and into the formative years of Ireland’s independent statehood. In this temporal alignment, Woolf’s Irish references form a cryptic pattern of textual punctuation and interruption, her narrative allusions to Ireland providing a sideline commentary on her main theme: the post-war decline of English liberalism and the interwar rise of domestic patriarchy and international fascism. The chapter tracks Woolf’s Irish allusions from the early novel The Voyage Out to her late work The Years—a faux-historical family saga strung chronologically between the fall of Parnell and the ascendancy of de Valera, while also assessing the impact of her relationship with the Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen. |