and nothing whatever happened’: Orlando’s Continuous Eruptive Form
and nothing whatever happened’: Orlando’s Continuous Eruptive Form
In this chapter, Suzanne Bellamy draws attention to the density of reference encompassed by a single sentence from Orlando, alighting on intertextual resonances between Woolf, Sackville-West, Stein and Laurence Sterne. The sentence on which Bellamy focuses is ‘a very long and daring exercise in linguistic implosion’; through its many-layered parody – notably of Woolf’s own writing in To the Lighthouse – this sentence undermines the narrative contract sustaining nature writing and mimetic description. However, as Bellamy’s reading reveals, it also enacts a Steinian process of composition as explanation, thus shedding light on Orlando as a modernist textual and visual experiment that enables new modes of perception.
Keywords: intertextuality, Gertrude Stein, Laurence Sterne, modernism, nature, parody, perception, poetics, visual art
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