Historicity of Categories of Fiction: Virginia Woolf’s Concept “Modern Fiction”

This article attempts to construct Woolf’s concept of “modern fiction” in modern context within the two dimensions: fiction’s category and historicity. Firstly, based on the essay “Modern Fiction”, the article aims to construct the connotation of “modern fiction”, which takes “historical consciousness”, “the duration of life”, “man’s subjectivity”, “the complexity of psychological structures” and “the relativity and pluralism of reality” as its contents. Then, this article mainly demonstrates the categories of “modern fiction”, which is employed to reveal the properties and attributes of fiction and regulates its fundamental mode of existence. Woolf’s “modern fiction” serves as a substance, around which the categories revolve. They are composed of “look within”, “impression”, “memory” and “feeling”, “the moment of importance”, “the psychological time” and “the flow of consciousness”. Thirdly, this article attempts to discuss the historicity of categories of “modern fiction”, namely the finiteness and openness of categories. For Woolf’s part, the categories of traditional fiction in the historical vision must be replaced by new ones due to its finiteness. In the discontinuity of the historical process, Woolf proceeds with the openness of categories of fiction, reflects the mental disorder of people, instills order in literary works and dissolves the dichotomy of man and self, man and the other, man and nature. Finally, the article concludes that in Woolf’s literary criticism, the categories of fiction are an open system. Woolf’s concept of “modern fiction” and its categories in modern condition guarantee the openness of fiction.