Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

Lighthouse and includes thoughts on time and space in fiction that were but fleetingly mentioned in 
the critical literature. In the present study, I formulated the following hypothetical premise: in her 
works, Woolf establishes the new rebellious, questioning, and contemplative type of narrative that 
reflected a radical change in the belief about humanity, the power of mind, the structure of the 
universe, the presence of God, and the role of a modern man in the world facing the shift from the 
world of stability to an ever-increasing society of revolutionary changes. In Woolf’s fiction, art 
became philosophically doubtful of the previous assumptions and values within society. There 
began a huge aesthetic transition based on the historic and literal time. In my investigation, I aimed 
to prove that the underpinnings of the modernist narrative in To the Lighthouse are based on time 
variability in its conceptual and linguistic representation. In the novel, the features of modernist 
writing are represented by linguistic deviations, violations, thus encouraging new thinking and 
rejection of gradual linear realistic description of time and space in a piece of fiction. Thus, in my 
paper, I have chosen the aforementioned novel as a conspicuous example of modern writing in 
which the innovative philosophical, psychological, and linguistic representation of time and space 
alterations stands out as the most important peculiarity of modernist fiction. 
The novelty and significance of present exploration consist of the theoretical analysing of time 
representation in literature and its practical application on the material of the analyzed novel. The 
present thesis contributes to the knowledge concerning the peculiarities of modern narrative as well 
as those of modernist literary discourse. The historical study of the changing notion of temporality 
in literature entails the relationships between natural, conceptual, and linguistic rendering of time in 

---

5 
fiction. Thus, the present study extends the existing knowledge of the psychological background, 
the transitivity and variability of time issues, and of the specific features the modernist narrative in 
the novel possesses.
The present paper is based on theoretical and practical investigation, the purpose of which is 
the analysis of the notion of natural, conceptual, and fictional time as a conceptual metaphor and as 
a mirror of inner and outer reality. The theoretical basis for my investigation of the time and space 
shift in the aforementioned novel is based on several overlapping critical theories: Practical 
Criticism that comprises formalist and new critical ideas together, Psychoanalysis, and the Theory 
of Narratology which foregrounds the narrator’s role. The purpose of the study contains four 
objectives that are designed in order to disclose the main four aspects, or steps, of the research. I 
foreground the following objectives in the given investigation: 
1. To provide a general overview of the roots and development of the movement of Modernism 
and its literary context.
2. To analyse the features of modernist literary discourse and the issues of Psychologism in 
order to reveal their remarkable influence on the literary works of Virginia Woolf and other 
modernist writers.
3. To disclose the linguistic and literary perspective of time and space in modernist narrative 
and to discuss the nature and difference between the represented and representational time
as well as the notion of temporality as factors which determine the psychology, motivation, 
and the behaviour of the characters.
4. To focus on the temporal perspective of the themes and structure of To the Lighthouse as 
well as psychological and ideational relations between time and space in the discourse of the 
novel and to extend existing knowledge of the shift of time in context.
The studies of my paper are based on a qualitative perspective and focus on the meaning and 
understanding of chosen literary sources rather than on measurement and search for scientific 
relationships among studied critical data. The application of content analysis including interface 
linguistic and literary dimensions is also based on several overlapping literary theories such as 
Formalism, New Criticism, Psychoanalysis, and Narratology. The study discusses theoretical 
approaches of Walter Allen, Chris Baldic, Susana Onega and Jose Angel Garcia Landa, Randall 
Stevenson, Izolda Rita Genienė, Peter Verdonk and Jean Jackues Weber, Hermione Lee, to mention 
but some of them. Some more theoretical material for the study is taken from a number of 
encyclopaedias and dictionaries, namely : Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture;