The Moment of Being & the Voice of Melancholy in Virginia Woolf's The Waves

My aim here is to draw attention to the relation between the modern epiphanic moment — of being, of vision, of awakening, depending on the novelist — and melancholy, a passion which seems more prominent in those times of crisis, like the Elisabethan age, when cracks open in the wall of semblances and shake the foundations of language — times when mist, nothingness, and fleeting shadows prevail as anti-epistemological values.Virginia Woolf rejoins Elisabethans in the recognition that there is...