Woman, Fiction and Modernism:Virginia Woolf and Modernist Fiction

As an outstanding modernist female writer in the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf appeals for women’s liberation in literary productions. Focusing on her most significant feminist criticism A Room of One’s Own, especially on the argument "It is useless to go to the great men writers for help . . . a man’s sentence . . . was unsuited for a woman’s use", this essay attempts to explore how Woolf searches for language and literary forms more suited for women writers in patriarchal society, and in what ways modernist language and literary form have been shaped by the motives for innovation in Woolf’s works. Shaping and being shaped by the trend of modernism, Woolf’s assertion of androgynous mind and her unique stream-of-consciousness techniques make contribution to modernist female writing.