Contrasting Types of Love in Novels by Virginia Woolf and Graham Swift
Contrasting Types of Love in Novels by Virginia Woolf and Graham Swift

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of the theme of love, focusing on romantic relationships, in novels by Virginia Woolf and Graham Swift. Chronologically, these two authors belong to Modernism and Postmodernism, respectively. The paper will start from observations about romantic relationships in a selection of their novels and correlate these observations with the features of love associated with these literary movements. We could notice the fact that love as romance is not the main focus of any of these novels, as a general feature. In Woolf’s novels, characters look inward, and focus on their individual process of development. In Swift’s novels, love is just an episode in the individuals’ lives, yet one that does matter. Modernist literature marks a change with what has been before in literature in terms of narrative technique, narrative focus, understanding of romantic relationships, and is generally open to experimentation. Postmodernist literature continues this trend. This is visible in the way Swift experiments with crossing the borders between poetry and prose in his fiction, as far as the lyricism associated with his stories is concerned. The same mixture of genres is found in Woolf’s novels, with respect to the way the characters confess their emotions related to love. Swift’s characters are looking for sharing emotional connection with their significant other, family and friends. Emotion is an integral part of all his novels, contrary to the expectations set up by the “waning of affect” in Postmodernism (Winnberg 2004). Both authors, through the attention to the emotional experiences, show that they are universal human needs, in spite of what the current trends are, whether imposed by society, which sees marriage as social convention, or individual fulfillment through a relationship.

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