About the author:
Natalya I. Reinhold, DSc in Philology, PhD in English (United Kingdom), Professor, the Department for Translation Studies, Interpreting and Translation, School of Philology and History, Russian State University for the Humanities, Miusskaya Square bld. 6, 125993 Moscow, Russia.
E-mail:
ORCID ID:https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2885-2339
Abstract:
The subject under consideration is the prominence of history of literature in the work of English modernists, in particular Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). The major focus is on the new and traditional aspects of the version of history as it is laid out by Woolf in her novel-cum-biography “Orlando” (1928). With this aim in view, the author analyses Woolf’s approach to history as a corpus of biographies, memoirs, and evidence of the past, in which are registered the social and material conditions, as well as the facilities for the creative self-realization of people in a certain historical period. Also, Woolf’s view on history as a subject of representation in a literary work and a field of shaping new writing techniques is studied in detail. Special attention is paid to her narrative technique of conflating the well-documented historical events with fiction in order to reveal the unknown aspects of history and elucidate the submerged motives of people’s actions, etc. In conclusion, Woolf’s literary project is appreciated against the background of some historical concepts of the second half of the twentieth century.