The Waves (Twentieth Century Classics) - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140185623 ISBN 13: 9780140185621

Publisher: Penguin Classic, 1992

Synopsis

2013 Reprint of 1931 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "The Waves," first published in 1931, is Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel. It consists of soliloquies spoken by the book's six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis. Also important is Percival, the seventh character, though readers never hear him speak through his own voice. The soliloquies that span the characters' lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset. As the six characters or "voices" alternately speak, Woolf explores concepts of individuality, self, and community. Each character is distinct, yet together they compose a gestalt about a silent central consciousness. The novel follows its six narrators from childhood through adulthood. Woolf's novel is concerned with the individual consciousness and the ways in which multiple consciousnesses can weave together. The difficulty of assigning genre to this novel is complicated by the fact that "The Waves" blurs distinctions between prose and poetry, allowing the novel to flow between six not dissimilar interior monologues. The book similarly breaks down boundaries between people, and Woolf herself wrote in her Diary that the six were not meant to be separate "characters" at all, but rather facets of consciousness illuminating a sense of continuity.

About this title

Book Description

This edition will be the most extensive and authoritative, the most fully collated, scrupulously researched and explicated text available to scholars to date, and for considerable time to come. Based on the first edition of Woolf's most challenging novel, this volume is an essential purchase for libraries and scholars.

From the Back Cover

"Clear, bright, burnished, at once marvelously accurate and subtly connotative. The pure, delicate sensibility found in this language and the moods it expresses are a true kind of poetry." "The New York Times
""The Waves" is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, standing with those few works of twentieth-century literature that have created unique forms of their own. In deeply poetic prose, Woolf traces the lives of six people from infancy to deathas theyfleetingly unite around the unseen figure of a seventh, Percival. Allusive and mysterious, "The Waves" yields new treasures upon each reading.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel. The author of numerous novels, collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.
Mark Hussey, general editor of Harcourt's annotated Woolf series, is professor of English at Pace University in New York City and editor of the Woolf Studies Annual.
Molly Hite is professor of English at Cornell University. She is the author of" Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative," and two novels, "Class Porn "and "Breach of Immunity." She has written articles on postmodernist and modernist fiction, feminist theory and practice, and academic culture.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classic
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140185623
• ISBN 13: 9780140185621
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Flint Kate