Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours: A Comparative Study

Abstract

In 2002 Stephen Daldry premiered the film The hours, inspired by the homonymous book published in 1998 by Michael Cunningham. Cunningham, in turn, had written his work to honor the english author Virginia Woolf and, more specifically, his novel Mrs. Dalloway. In the present study, as the main objective, we will analyze the artifices and gears that operate in the intertextuality of the three works. We will identify the narrative strategies used in each of them and we will demonstrate both the differences and the similarities between the three. We will deepen into the devices that the cinema uses to transfer the narrative texts of both Woolf and Cunningham to the big screen.