Stream of consciousness

A "mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator's intervention, the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character's mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations" (Abrams 299). The technique was refined in the 1920s and is a hallmark of Modernist classics such as James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) or Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925).

Sources

• Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th Edition. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1999.