Time

Abstract Orlando and other texts express Woolf’s interest in subjective ‘time in the mind’, an interest she shared with other modernists who challenged chronological norms, but Woolf explored other forms of time as well. Some align her work with the theories of Henri Bergson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Mary Sturt, and this variety—the way Woolf developed forms of time across her career as a writer—tracks with the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. His Time and Narrative explains the dialectical pattern according to which Woolf perpetually found new ways for time and narrative to shape each other, culminating in novels that thematize this reciprocal relationship between the art of narrative and possibilities for temporal engagement. Woolf’s early fiction breaks with linear chronology, starting a series of virtuoso performances of temporal poiesis.