Introduction

This course, Exploring Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, is designed to explore the historical context of the final work of Virginia Woolf, one of the most significant modernist writers of the twentieth century. You’ll read about the historical context that led to the writing of this novel, which was written during the late 1930s, and published during the Second World War. You’ll explore Woolf’s views on the role of this novel, and the wider significance of literature and language. As well as reading about the novel, you will read several extracts from it, which will have audio readings accompanying them, and you’ll be asked to analyze these extracts, and determine how Woolf achieved her aims by depicting images, memories, and language. It would be helpful, but not essential, to read Between the Acts for this course. Where passages from the novel are used in the course, the page numbers cited correspond to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the text.  

Learning Outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• Identify Woolf’s ideas about time, memory and identity
• Understand the role of innovation and experimentation in prose fiction
• Demonstrate a developed ability to read dense poetic prose analytically.