Abstract
This chapter focuses on Michael Cunningham’s engagement with Virginia Woolf’s life and work in his novel The Hours (1998). Through an analysis of Cunningham’s transnational transposition of the plot of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and the fictionalisation of Woolf herself, this chapter proposes that The Hours presents certain thematic concerns that are integral to Cunningham’s identity as an American writer, namely the smudging of the boundaries between fiction and reality and the conceptualisation of world-building in extratextual terms. Moreover, this chapter argues that world-building is a key motif for the critical reading of American identity grounded in the artificial discourses of a world created by real-life narratives towards the end of the twentieth century, very much as Woolf had suggested in 1925, when Mrs Dalloway was published.
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Jiménez, M. (2020). The Hours and the Nations: Virginia Woolf’s Life and Art in Michael Cunningham’s America. In: Rensen, M., Wiley, C. (eds) Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_14
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