ArticleAuthors: Vanessa Smith (2016)
The word ‘world’ recurs ninety-six times in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a work more commonly understood as a Modernist experiment with temporality and voice, but which might also be thought of as one of the novel’s most self-reflexive engagements with world-making. The increasingly extended speech acts of six voices are encapsulated within typographically distinct interludes, whose description of the gradual revelation of sky and firmament and the movement of light and water over the course of a single day recalls the foundational world-creation of Genesis. In the effortful process of extracting character, context, narrative time and sequence from the continuous present of the voices’... 
