dc.contributor.author	Reid, Clara Charlotte-Imogen
dc.date.accessioned	2025-05-15T17:02:22Z
dc.date.available	2025-05-15T17:02:22Z
dc.date.issued	2025-05-08
dc.identifier.other	6880df1c-9ff0-47fc-917a-815d7c28bc26	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/10428/7419
dc.description.abstract	Much has been said on the sense of Virginia Woolf's works, but little on the nonsense. Literary nonsense is a genre most often associated with Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, but it also has a home in Woolf's use of conversation in Freshwater and Between the Acts. In the act of reading these works, impressions of nonsense arise and show a tension between sets of order and disorder which is reflected in the behavior of rules governing conversation. Using Stanley Fish's affective stylistics, H.P. Grice's pragmatics, and Elizabeth Sewell's definition of literary nonsense, nonsense appears in these two works as a game played out between order and disorder through conversations between characters and the conversation between reader and text. This order and disorder corresponds to moments in which conversational implicature works as intended on the one hand, and those moments when it breaks down on the other. Using progressive decertainizing from Fish's affective stylistics, a close reading of both texts shows how impressions of nonsense arise in the space between conversational implicature breaking down and being restored. The tension in this space can then be favorably compared to the tension in Elizabeth Sewell's definition of nonsense as a game. Wim Tigges' genre taxonomy of whole and partial nonsense provides context to how these works can be classified after a close reading has been performed, and provides a foundation for what it means to call something a work of literary nonsense. A classification of either whole or partial nonsense is reached for both works according to Tigges' taxonomy, along with a discussion afterward about the implications of what this means in the context of the current scholarship.	en_US
dc.format.extent	1 electronic record. PDF/A document, 67 pages, 954003 bytes.	en_US
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf	en_US
dc.rights	This dissertation is protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States (Public Law 94-553, revised in 1976). Consistent with fair use as defined in the Copyright Laws, brief quotations from this material are allowed with proper acknowledgement. Use of the materials for financial gain with the author's expressed written permissions is not allowed.	en_US
dc.subject	Pragmatics	en_US
dc.subject	Academic theses	en_US
dc.subject	Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941	en_US
dc.subject	English literature--20th century	en_US
dc.subject	English literature	en_US
dc.subject	Nonsense literature	en_US
dc.subject	Literary form	en_US
dc.subject	Conversation analysis	en_US
dc.title	The Whimsy and the Woolf: Literary Nonsense in the Works of Virginia Woolf	en_US
dc.type	Thesis	en_US
dc.contributor.department	Department of English of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences	en_US
dc.description.advisor	Katawal, Ubaraj
dc.description.committee	Byrd, Melanie
dc.description.committee	Thompson, Theresa
dc.description.degree	M.A.	en_US
dc.description.major	English	en_US