Jacob's Room: Occasions of War, Representations of History

In her 1922 novel, Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf makes use of strategic omissions of factual information as her narrative represents the approach and consequences of the First World War. Her "art of indirection" reenacts the failure of the rationalist language that underpins English Liberalism in the early twentieth century and, in a larger sense, it relives the crisis the Great War represents in the history of liberal modernity. This crisis locates the staging area of an identifiably modernist aesthetic in Woolf's postwar work, which is especially alert to representations of political, historical, and linguistic rupture.