抄録
In my thesis I have done a comparative reading of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in order to map out how the two authors managed bring about a shift in the Irish and English literary tradition. My main focus has been on generic ambiguity in the two works, exploring how Joyce and Woolf combines aspects of the (auto)biography and the novel, and truth and imagination in order to create an entirely new “hybrid-genre” that goes beyond the traditional Victorian novel. A second objective of the thesis is to explore to what extent the two novels can be said to represent the modernist projects of the two authors. I have explored how Joyce and Woolf, by problematising and reflecting upon the previous generic norms, have contributed to the modernist movement, as well as the development of the English novel in the twentieth century.