The language of persuasion in Virginia Woolf’s essayistic prose

Abstract

This book offers a study of Virginia Woolf’s essays from the perspective of rhetorical argumentation. It characterises her style as a modernist writer and essayist, showing how her prose, structured, elegant, and rich in personal reflection, guides readers through complex ideas without imposing dogmatic conclusions. The corpus spans Woolf’s career, including the two series of The Common Reader, the posthumous collections The Death of the Moth, The Moment, The Captain’s Death Bed, Granite and Rainbow, and the independent essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. After presenting rhetoric as a general theory of argumentation, the study reviews the history of the reception of Woolf’s essays and her trajectory as a journalist and critic. The core of the book is the analysis of the essays, organised around their main themes, their patterns of argumentation, and their characteristic forms of expression. Special attention is paid both to the types of arguments that recur in her prose and to the profusion of rhetorical figures such as simile, rhetorical questioning, and repetition, which not only create rhythm but also contribute to meaning. Woolf’s essays are thus presented as critical texts that offer reasoned justification of their topics while maintaining a subjective and non-dogmatic point of view. In doing so, the book shows that Woolf’s language of persuasion remains a powerful instrument for thinking about literature, society, and the place of women and common readers in both.