Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

 

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ABSTRACT 
 
The purpose of the present paper was to explore a new approach to the notions of time, temporality, 
and space within modernist literature, the distinction of the natural, conceptual, and fictional time as 
well as the alterations of time due to the deictic centre. The investigation of the above-mentioned 
issues was based on the modernist novel To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. The main method 
chosen for the study was content analysis. The research of time and space shift in the given novel is 
grounded on several overlapping critical theories: Practical Criticism, which comprises Formalist 
and New Critical ideas, Psychoanalysis, and the Theory of Narratology. The research demonstrated 
that Virginia Woolf attempted to structure her novel outside the conventional clock of time 
treatment because it was too inflexible to be suitable for a writer who believed that time represented 
in fiction should reflect the way time influences and is influenced by human lives. The given novel 
is a conspicuous example of an innovative concept of time and space presented by the author who 
gave preference to the abstract inner time rather than to that of the outer world and who come 
closer than any other writer to expressing time as it actually is experienced in human mind. The 
present study extended the existing knowledge of the psychological background, the transitivity and 
variability of time issues, and of the specific features the modern narrative in the novel. Further 
studies of the representation of time and space alterations in modernist fiction furnish new 
possibilities which determine the influence of time and space conceptions in a literary narrative and 
in the processes of breaking with linearity of the fabula, concentrating on its deviations and 
Psychologism that had a formative impact on modernist literature. .