Abstract
The sea is an almost universally shared and understood symbol, the use of which gives a welcome core of certainty to the various feelings and experiences which literature sometimes inadequately attempts to express. Powerful precisely because it has relatively „fixed“ representations in human thought and can make possible a unified aesthetic experience, the sea has functioned as an abiding symbol in literature, appropriated by many poetic minds, not just poets per se, over the centuries.
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Notes
Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf,ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: New American Library, 1953), p. 134; 7 November 1928 entry.
J. W. Graham, Virginia Woolf: The Waves (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 14. This study consists of two drafts transcribed and edited by J. W. Graham, from seven manuscripts of The Waves on which Woolf labored from mid-1929 to mid-1931 (from the first draft to the correction of proofs).
Quoted in Allen McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 5.
Quoted in Joan Bennett, Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), p. 106. Graham has also noted the „surfacing of words and images from the DeQuincey essay“ (Virginia Woolf,p. 15).
Manuscript volume 1,2 July 1929 and 4 September 1929 respectively.
Quoted in James Hafley, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), p. 120.
Virginia Woolf, „Phases of Fiction,“ in Collected Essays ( New York: Harcourt, New York: 1967 ), 2: 85.
„Modern Fiction,“ in ibid., 2:106.
For example, this further passage from „Modern Fiction“: „Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide“ (ibid., 2:105).
„DeQuincey’s Autobiography,“ in Collected Essays,4:20.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or the Whale ( New York: Modern Library, 1950 ), p. 565.
William Butler Yeats, who wrote a play entitled „Fighting the Waves,“ said in the introduction to Wheels and Butterflies (New York: Macmillan, 1935), the volume containing his drama, that „certain typical books“ — and he named Ulysses and The Waves among others — give readers „a deluge of experience breaking over us and within us, melting limits whether of line or tint; man no hard bright mirror dawdling by the dry sticks of a hedge, but a swimmer, or rather the waves themselves“ (p. 65).
Quoted in Eugene F. Kaelin, Art and Existence: A Phenomenological Aesthetics (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1970), p. 252. Compare the French literary critic Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works,trans. Jean Stewert (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1965), p. 378: „The Waves is an attempt to formulate Being.“
Woolf,A Writer’s Diary,p. 145.
„Jacob’s Room“ and „The Waves“: Two Complete Novels (New York: Harvest Books); hereafter cited in the text.
Manuscript volume 1, p. 17; quoted in Graham, Virginia Woolf,p. 205.
Quoted in John Lehmann, Virginia Woolf and Her World (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), p. 79.
Woolf,A Writer’s Diary,p. 156.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson ( New York: Collier Books, 1962 ), p. 138.
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Randles, B.S. (1985). The Waves of Life in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: The Sea. Analecta Husserliana, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-3960-9_3
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