Virginia Woolf's views on the novel in "The Narrow Bridge of Art"
IntroductionIn this essay I will try to deal with several things which American writer Virginia Woolf mentions in her essay "The Narrow bridge of art". She gives very interesting and fascinating thoughts of the novel of the future (future from the point of time she lived in). Her mind is concerned with the form, the content and the very concept of this new novel which should be born in the near future. However, before coming to this point of essay where she already gives the features of this new-becoming literary kind of art, we are introduced with the very reasons and causes which gave birth to this new kind of novel. Also, the great part of essay is dedicated to the comparison between nowadays writers and those from the past, that is Elizabethan writers. Writers´ attitude towards life plays a great part in development and directioning of novel as a literary form.
I mentioned all this things without any visible successive order, just to make an introduction of what I will be talking about. Now, I will try to deal with each of these items one by one, as they are presented in the Virginia Woolf 's essay.
Main partHer essay starts with a notification (of presence) of something queer, strange and confusing in modern literature. She also brings up the issue of writers who cannot express themselves easily, in natural way. The reason for this she sees in a "failure of poetry to serve us as it has served so many generations of our fathers."So, poetry itself cannot any more satisfy the new tendencies of expression. View on the life, perception of the world and man himself now as a container of collision, confusion, mixture of feelings, contradictional emotions needs to be written about fully, naturally, with easiness. Yet, this does not happen. There is obviously some obstacle in whole writer generation which prevents them from expressing their thoughts in great, admiring, but yet natural way. According to Virginia, this strength of opposite emotions, completely
I mentioned all this things without any visible successive order, just to make an introduction of what I will be talking about. Now, I will try to deal with each of these items one by one, as they are presented in the Virginia Woolf 's essay.
Main partHer essay starts with a notification (of presence) of something queer, strange and confusing in modern literature. She also brings up the issue of writers who cannot express themselves easily, in natural way. The reason for this she sees in a "failure of poetry to serve us as it has served so many generations of our fathers."So, poetry itself cannot any more satisfy the new tendencies of expression. View on the life, perception of the world and man himself now as a container of collision, confusion, mixture of feelings, contradictional emotions needs to be written about fully, naturally, with easiness. Yet, this does not happen. There is obviously some obstacle in whole writer generation which prevents them from expressing their thoughts in great, admiring, but yet natural way. According to Virginia, this strength of opposite emotions, completely
Bibliography: Woolf, Virginia, "The Narrow bridge of art", in Collected essays by Virginia Woolf, (London:The Hogarth Press, 1996.)