In 'A Sketch of the Past' we find some peculiar experiences Woolf had as a child during her stay at St Ives. Of the moments of being three exceptional instances seem to have had significant influences on her. Writing them down for the first time she says she realized that though two of them ended in a state of despair, the second ended, on the contrary, in a state of satisfaction. In Tola Notebook' Joyce also places satisfaction at the last stage of apprehension. Somehow Woolf's experiences and activities such as apprehending an object as a whole, to restore the order by putting the severed parts together or feeling pleasure at the end, seem to illustrate Stephen's aesthetics in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce never uses the term 'epiphany' in A Portrait. For the supreme moment he borrowed phrases such as Shelley's 'fading coal' or Luigi Galvani's 'enchantment of heart'. These phrases suggest that some incandescence or fusion took place in Stephen's heart. In a state of rapture Woolf also experiences incandescence which made her feel warm, producing a state of synaesthesia. In "Impressions at Bayreuth" she depicts how Wagner's opera Parsifal lifted her out of the ordinary world and produced in her an aesthetic whole in which the opera and the outer world were fused into one. While writing Ulysses Joyce tried to give the colour and tone of Dublin with his words. Mrs. Dalloway is often considered to be its counterpart. But before the publication of Ulysses Woolf's draft of "Kew Gardens" was completed. It was her first trial to make an aesthetic whole with the texture of her words.

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Although Virginia Woolf confessed more than once in her diary that she was jealous of Katherine Mansfield, we are likely to be perplexed by this confession, besides which, few critics have ever thought much of it. Presumably the reason for that is that Woolf is now acclaimed as a great feminist writer, while Mansfield is viewed as a minor author of short fictions. Yet it is a fact that there was severe rivalry between them. Woolf both loved and hated Mansfield, her rival, and their complicated and troubled friendship had more than a little influence upon Woolfs writing. This paper attempts to study their love-hate relationship, and to reassess Mansfield's influence upon Woolf. Firstly, I would like to prove that their early friendship encouraged them to write their first experimental novels. Secondly, I am going to look at Woolf's obsession with Mansfield. After Mansfield died, Woolf wrote many novels whose settings were similar to those of Mansfield's, and create characters based on Mansfield herself. Thirdly, I will delve into the Mansfield's myth that depicts her as a new woman artist who dared to disregard decorum, to take adventures. Woolf was fascinated with the myth, and consequently, it had a strong effect upon her feminist essays such as "Women and Fiction" or A Room One's Own. In a conclusion, I would like to assert that Woolf needed Mansfield as "an ice-breaking vessel."

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Virginia Woolf s idea of "self" differs greatly from that of Katherine Mansfield. This paper identifies and investigates the difference in their view of "self" to reveal their essential difference in English literature. Woolf believes that the individual "self" cannot be the foundation or the center of human existence. She holds that "self is unstable and elusive, like a will-o'-the wisp ; it is always changing in response to the forces surrounding it. Thus, she abandons the individual "self" and seeks a new foundation that transcends the individual. And she finds that every single life transcends time and place and unites into one whole organic life, where both division and identity of the individual self are lost. Woolf considers this cosmic-dimensioned whole life to be our true foundation. Mansfield finds her "true self," which is single and particular, to be the real and reliable foundation of human existence. She believes that her "true self" lies deep within her consciousness and in a revelatory moment she can feel her own self and affirm her existence by it. Of course, this self is different from the conventional self that lies on the surface. Thus, Woolf and Mansfield have opposing ideas of "self." When we view these authors in terms of the Modernist movement, we see that Mansfield belongs to the early development of Modernism and Woolf to the later. This difference in terms of Modernism is one of their main differences in English literature.

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This essay discusses how the description of daily life in Virginia Woolf's The Years (1937) creates a new type of fictional family chronicle. In this novel, Woolf attempts to present the everyday life which is the undercurrent of historical discourse. Conversations between people, the noise in the bustling street, the disorderly party, etc., which would normally have remained as a background to the story, constitute the mainstream of the discourse in this novel. James Naremore says : "In writing The Years, Woolf tried to give a concrete demonstration of the split between private and public worlds, the conflict between a timeless, transpersonal human nature and a divisive, changing social structure. She also provided intimation of that unity which haunts the mind, and envisioned history moving toward a potential resolution of people's inner conflicts" (246). The history on the surface of public memory and a personal history in the background - a history of everyday life - are focused on at the same time, as Narremore also comments : "Although history is one of the book's manifest subjects, The Years subordinates public events to a series of domestic scenes or dinner parties" (246). By analyzing the language of everyday life which emerges from the undercurrent of history in The Years, the following three points are treated : first, how the historicity of public events is transformed by the narrator's description of the unrecorded flow of language used in domestic scenes and dinner parties ; secondly, what the reason for deferring the end of this family chronicle is ; thirdly, how the new sequence, as well as the new kind of language, could be read as a device to offer something beyond patriarchal temporality.

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