Through the figure of Miss La Trobe, and author of the pageant, Virginia Woolf questions imperialist assumptions and, at the same time, re-creates the elusive role of the artist. The pageant, a series of scenes from English history, and the private dramas that go on between the acts, are closely interlinked. Through dialogue, humour and the passionate musings of the characters, Virginia Woolf explores how a community is formed (and scattered) over time. Virginia Woolf's final novel, now in Penguin Black Classics The pageant, a series of scenes from English history, and t. Outwardly a novel about life in a country-house in whose grounds there is to be a pageant, Between the Acts is also a striking evocation of English experience in the months leading up to the Second World War. Readers of the novel, and spectators of the play around which the novel is structured, are similarly enjoined to move from observational to creative roles by recognizing their stake in engendering a counter-narrative to the one that, in Woolf 's time, seemed unambiguously apocalyptic.Virginia Woolf's final novel, now in Penguin Black Classics The fact that it is a female playwright who directs the subversive pageant of English history interpolated in the novel is significant, with Woolf anticipating that the matrilineal aesthetics, which would subsequently be conceptualized by feminist theorists including Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, might effectively mitigate violent tendencies underlying patriarchal aesthetics that had thus far induced conflict among humans.

Scientific developments from Charles Darwin onwards invite particular scrutiny in Woolf 's text, which suggests that art may imbue humans with values that foster compassion for others, supplanting organized religions that seem to have failed in this respect. The contingent nature of life is encapsulated in the novel's fragmentary language, and through addressing multiple genres simultaneously, the text probes the past in an attempt to comprehend a terrifying present, and to prognosticate about humanity's capacity to endure in an uncertain future. Written during modernism's eclipse and at the outset of World War II, the first conflict that threatened to annihilate humanity through the deployment of atomic weaponry,Woolf 's text seems to anticipate what would later be recognized in terms of postmodern preoccupation with metanarrative. New York: Harcourt.), is precariously situated in both literary and temporal terms. Virginia Woolf 's final novel, Between the Acts ( 2008.

Woolf between the acts