Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 6 - Virginia Woolf’s Passive Revolution

  • Judith Brown, Indiana University
  • Book:
    Modernism and the Idea of India
    Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025, pp 136-158

  • Summary

    This chapter reads the formulation of modernism itself as a passive revolution in Virginia Woolf’s experimental prose. The passive revolution she conceives in The Waves, like Gramsci’s rendering of the “revolution without revolution," plays on the paradox of conservative content and radical form. Woolf’s novel illuminates the failures of high modernism to represent the world and performs a kind of self-critique, as well as a critique of the limitations of Western modernism created by a bourgeois class with a pretense for world-making in concert with the British establishment. The Waves advances the idea of global modernism by seeing the world as an invention of language wielded by an ambitious few. Colonial India stands at the center as that misty site of desire and loss against which the communal identity of its six characters is formed. Empire is imagined here as a vacuum, with absence at its center, and formalized in Woolf’s novel as a passive revolution tied to the advancing day.