03/05/21

Essay letteratura Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were the greatest exponents of the literary current of
modernism and who have made a huge contribution to English literature. Although they are
both authors of modernism it is important to compare them so as to understand obviously
the similarities but also the differences.
Both develop a form of psychological realism from realism, use symbols to attract the
reader's attention so as to induce him towards multiple interpretations and use experimental
narrative techniques. Their works are characterized by a sense of loneliness of the
characters, of doom and there is also a sense of detachment. They also try to express states
of mind and emotions with words and there is a time dilation with the use of flashbacks.
However, there are also numerous differences between the two as in Virginia the moral
conflict is not as evident as the religious torment in Joyce, the characters in Virginia's works
do not take on a mythical dimension unlike those present in Joyce's Ulysses and Joyce's
narrative technique is presented as much more experimental than Virginia's.
There is also a difference between the two in the characters who in Virginia's works belong
to the upper class and try to react to the outer conditions by adaptation while in Joyce they
belong to the lower middle class and are victims of themselves.
I appreciated Virginia Woolf's poetics more than Joyce's because she tried with great
audacity to break the mold of 20th-century society, changing the role of women within it.