Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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INTRODUCTION 
 
The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by new ideas, social and cultural 
developments, and remarkable changes in literature and linguistics. New historical, political, and 
socio-cultural crises and upheavals raised the idea of the changing time that was best expressed in 
literary works of the modernist movement, which rose as a revolt against old stereotypes used in the 
life and in the literature of Realism. Modernism emerged at the end of the nineteenth and the 
beginning of the twentieth century as an affirmation of the human power to invent, create, and 
evolve in response to the revolutionary advances in science and technology. According to the 
theorist Randall Stevenson (1998:56), this new trend was an attempt to break free from the accepted 
norms of logically arranged unsophisticated narrative in Realism. Modernists denied the way 
realists portrayed reality and argued that Realism did not depict real life as everything happens in 
the mind. Thus, for modernists, reality is a mirror that reflects human thoughts, feelings, and 
reactions exactly as they occur in their mind. It is possible to claim that Modernism was a revolt 
against the conservative values of Realism. The term encompasses the activities and output of those 
who argued that the traditional forms of art, literature, religious faith, social relationships, and daily 
life were becoming obsolete in the context of new economic, social, and political conditions in the 
modern urbanized and technologized world. 
The Modernist movement also questioned the belief that human abilities and achievements 
were based on loyalty to stable undeniable traditions. The theorist Chris Baldic emphasizes the fact 
(1996:49) that new insights, developments, and great changes in the sphere of art arose as a 
response to the meaninglessness of the war that led to the crisis of accepted norms and standards in 
human consciousness and in their world understanding. According to the critic, it became obvious 
that the institutions of government that had to protect people and ensure a safe life disappointed the 
civilized world and led it into a terrible confusion. Consequently, modernist writers no longer 
considered the reality as reliable means to portray the meaning of life, and therefore turned within 
themselves to discover the answers. In their literary works, modernists showed a rebellious new 
way of thinking and acting, their masterpieces were a way of leading a life, not just experimenting 
in style. Besides, according to Stevenson (1998), modernists severely criticized the Formalist 
approach that aimed to carry the analysis of literature only in terms of close reading, the plot, and 
textual structure. In modernist literature, symbols, themes, and patterns of depicting the complex 
human nature gradually become more important than the logical plot or flat one-dimensional 
characters, preserved from Formalism and Realism. As stated by Susana Onega and Jose Angel 
Garcia Landa (1996:21), “the modernist revolution had deep consequences for the writing and 

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criticism of all literary genres.” Indeed, in the linguists’ opinion, the new modernist narrative 
emphasized the role of psychology and the power of human mind that resulted in representation of 
life through psychological perception that also was reflected in language revolution.
The issues mentioned above lead us to the following hypothetical assertion: modern art and 
fiction thus acquired a new impetus: to portray human mind and consciousness. For instance, in the 
well-known novel of the modernist writer Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse, the concept of literary 
narrative was quite revolutionary, breaking with linearity of the fabula, changeability of the 
narrative sequence, and concentration on Psychologism that had a formative impact on her novels, 
influencing both characterization of agents and structural development. The problem statement of 
this study can be worded in the following question: what are the nature and the peculiarities of this 
completely new approach to the notions of time, temporality, and space within the novel, the 
writer’s distinction of the natural, conceptual, and fictional time as well as the alterations of time 
due to the deictic centre?
The interest of field of the investigation covers the use of the notion of temporality in To the