Utilizing the traditional form of a critical essay, Woolf writes in a unique stream-of-consciousness style that seeks to persuade her reader that traditional forms themselves perhaps ought to be done away with. “Must novels be like this?” (160), she asks in one of the essay’s many rhetorical questions. Similarly, in her discussion of the short story she invokes conventional wisdom—that short stories “should be brief and conclusive” (163)—before questioning whether the story under discussion can really be called a short story at all given that it has neither of these traits. By implication, her argument also casts doubt on the characteristics that critics have used to make generic classifications (i.e., classifications related to genre). Woolf challenges these conventions, exploring The Relationship Between Form and Content, in service of the essay’s central project: the reconfiguration of English fiction for the modern or Modernist writer. The essay “Modern Fiction” is not simply a “survey” of its declared subject matter but a pseudo-manifesto on the possibilities of both style/structure and subject matter in modern literature.

Woolf was distinctly influenced by both the philosophical and artistic developments of the early 20th century that accompanied literary Modernism.