Generous dissonance and wanderings: form and politics in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Ali Smith's Hotel World.

Abstract

This essay looks at, and compares, Hotel World by Ali Smith and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and attempts to understand the differences within both the formal and philosophical/political outlook of the two works. Presuming stream-of-consciousness as both a set of formal prosaic styles and a genre, the essay argues that the way the novels utilize formal style is indicative of their individual politics in counterintuitive ways. Furthermore, it argues that by looking at these two novels we can begin to map a lineage of queer stream-of-consciousness works and explore how those perspectives have changed over time.