To the Lighthouse (1927) was Woolf’s next novel, after the success of Mrs. Dalloway. It concerns a large family spending a summer at the seaside, much like Woolf’s own family did during her childhood.
Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce, is a challenging book. The title refers to the famous classical Greek story of a man’s epic travels (those of Odysseus, also called Ulysses). The epic journey, it has been said, refers less to the main character’s (Ulysses’/Leopold Bloom’s) perambulations through Dublin and more to the journey the reader experiences as he or she reads through the extraordinary stylistic shifts that make up this modernist novel. Like Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses takes place within a single day and characterizes a city as well as its characters.
The Hours (1998), by Michael Cunningham, is a recently published novel based on Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It interweaves the lives of three women in three times: Virginia Woolf in 1923, a 1949 Woolf fan in Los Angeles, and a present day Clarissa, planning a party.
The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner, is a novel whose stylistic beauty and experimentation represent an American modernism contemporaneous to the experiments of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce abroad.
Leave a Reply