A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism ― Rewriting Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, one of the most significant modernist texts from the Western literary canon, has spawned numerous contemporary offspring. Contemporary authors have dialogued with it, challenged it, reinvented it and offered creative responses to it, thus reinforcing its accumulated critical reputation and canonical status. After meticulously tracing the genesis of Woolf's most iconic novel so as to examine the production of Woolf's idiosyncratic Dalloway-esque signature, A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism sets out to explore its reproduction by a variety of postmodernist and neomodernist Anglo-American writers who are either openly indebted to Woolf's novel or covertly influenced by it. The contemporary tributes that are indebted to Mrs Dalloway in so many ways have rejuvenated the Woolfian novel and have propelled it into the twenty-first century. Almost a hundred years after its publication, Woolf's Mrs Dalloway has proved to be an enduring text, an 'ice-breaking vessel' which continues to invite 'individual talents' to follow in its wake.

Monica Latham is a Senior Lecturer of British literature at the English Department of the Universite de Lorraine in Nancy, France, and a specialist of Virginia Woolf and genetic criticism. She has published numerous articles on modernist and postmodernist authors. She is also the co-editor of the series Book Practices and Textual Itineraries.