The New Feeling Omniscience: Imperial Affects, Publicness and Narrative Style in Mrs Dalloway

Abstract:Through a reading of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, I argue that the modernist novel’s charting of intense emotions pushes narrative to a new level of feeling. An affective reading of modernist narrative allows us to see how free indirect style, which is understood primarily as evidencing individual subjectivity, has a public face, and how cognitive processes are inseparable from the shared affect that impinges on private thought. In this reading, the modernist novel is not only an inward affair but is also concerned with how the affect and politics operate at the heart of what is considered most inward.