No artigo “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” publicado em 1927, Virginia Woolf ao especular sobre o que será a literatura do futuro, questiona-se a propósito da definição do género literário. Diz que caminhamos em direcção à prosa e que esta será usada para objectivos nunca visados até aí. E continua:

«That cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art will
by then have devoured even more. We shall be forced to invent new
names for the different books which masquerade under this one heading.
And it is possible that there will be among the so-called novels one which
we shall scarcely know how to christen. It will be written in prose, but in
prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have
something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of
prose. It will be dramatic, and yet not a play. It will be read, not acted. By
what name we are to call it is not a matter of very great importance. What
is important is that this book which we see on the horizon may serve to
express some of those feelings which seem at the moment to be balked
by poetry pure and simple and to find the drama equally inhospitable to
them.»


Virginia Woolf