Parody and metafiction: Virginia Woolf 's 'An Unwritten Novel'

Abstract

The present article aims at vindicating the dimension where Virginia Woolf was more overtly «metafictional»: the practice of some of her short fiction. According to her, this was a new genre freed from the realist conventions that had modelled the novel from its inception as a literary form. Such an attitude is openly at work in «An Unwritten Novel» (1920), a short piece which parodies realism by laying bare the functioning of its conventions while opening the way to new fictional modes of understanding literature. «An Unwritten Novel» draws attention to itself and to its process of construction, laying bare its self-reflecting mechanisms which so ostensibly oppose realism.