TY - THES ID - 136997845 TI - Imagining Virginia Woolf : A Comparative Analysis of Biographies and Biographical Fictions (Six Case Studies) AU - Cernat, Laura AU - de Graef, Ortwin AU - KU Leuven. Faculteit Letteren. Opleiding Master of Western Literature PY - 2014 PB - Leuven : K.U. Leuven. Faculteit Letteren DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:136997845 AB - In this master thesis, I compared four biographies and two novels about the life of Virginia Woolf. I chose this author because she had a very complex view of biography and performed interesting experiments in the genre, notably her novel, 'Orlando. A Biography'.In order to provide a background for Woolf's revolutionary view of biography, which she had in common with contemporaries of hers like Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson, in the first chapter I sketched a condensed history of the evolution of conceptions about biography, mostly from the eighteenth century on, focusing especially on the problem of defining biography as a history/science or as an art. The most important steps of this historical outline are the switch from Victorian biography (i.e. late nineteenth century) to what was called the 'New Biography' (including Woolf) and then the change of perspective over history itself, brought by Hayden White in the 1970s and 1980s (namely, history is considered a construct, a narration and not a form of direct access to truth. The end of the chapter talks about the evolution of another version of biography, termed 'biographical fiction', which includes mainly novels with a real person's life as a subject.The second chapter goes deeper into exploring the conflict between the nineteenth century view of biography and the new perspective brought by Woolf and her contemporaries, by analysing the relationship between Virginia Woolf and her father Leslie Stephen, who was a Victorian author and editor of the 'Dictionary of National Biography', from both a scientific and a personal point of view. The bottom line of the opposition between the two personalities is that burdensome Victorian biography was replaced by Woolf with a lighter and livelier style of life-writing. Further on, in the second chapter I try to answer some of the criticism against Woolf, in order to explain the role of her ambiguous characterizations of biography.Having explained Woolf's view, I then... ER -