English 12 / Unit 6: Modern and Postcolonial Literature
6.4 Modernist Fiction
Notes
Modernist novelists focused on the inner life.
- Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) covers one day in London and moves between characters' thoughts. It opens with a simple sentence: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
- Stream of consciousness may include long sentences, shifts in time, and sudden memories.
- James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) follows one day in Dublin and echoes Homer's Odyssey.
- Plot matters less than perception and memory.
Practice
What is the main focus of a modernist novel like Mrs Dalloway?
Woolf follows minds moving across one day.
A passage moves quickly from a woman buying flowers to a memory of a summer thirty years earlier and then back to the street, without a clear break. This is most like:
The shifts follow the flow of thought.
Joyce's Ulysses follows one day in Dublin and echoes Homer's Odyssey. This is an example of:
Modernists often allude to earlier works.
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