Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

English

Reader 1

Sarah Raff

Reader 2

Aaron Matz

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2025 Willa G Frank

Abstract

Literary still life is a vital element of Virginia Woolf’s writing which recurs in almost all of her novels. Through these passages, she attends to the object world, portrays the animation of nonhuman entities, and adapts the aesthetic movements of her time present in modernist still life to the page. In this adaptation, Woolf’s literary still life becomes defined not by its stasis but rather by the rhythm she creates through the layering of these passages, one of the gathering and releasing of stillness. In this thesis, I propose literary still life as a way of thinking about the object-focused passages which are essential to Woolf’s narrative projects in Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.

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