Focusing on the importance of formal experimentation for matters of content and meaning, this original interpretation of what Woolf called her "play-poem" argues that with its depiction of a certain social setting--populated by individuals that are often traumatized, hurt, and socially isolated--The Waves must be read both as an attestation to the social estrangement inherent in modern and metropolitan life and as an allegory of the collapse of the classical subject itself, as a model and a phenomenon, both in literature and in ordinary life. This book differs from other approaches to Woolf...