Reproducing The Narrative Features Of Virginia Woolf’s Stream-of-Consciousness Novels

Virginia Woolf, a master of stream-of-consciousness novels who enjoys equal popularity to Marcel Proust of France and James Joyce of England, occupies an irreplaceable position in the world literature history.From the perspective of narratology, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novels have their own distinct features. Different from traditional novelists, Woolf doesn’t pay attention to the objective story plot, but focuses on her characters’inner world, representing the real state of their floating consciousness. She introduces Bergson’s psychological space-time theory into literature narrative. She applies narrative strategies of music and painting in her novel writing, which gives her novels unique poetic features.To some degree, the quality of Woolf’s works’translation largely rests on whether the translator can reproduce their narrative features. In recent years, with the "cognitive turn" in translation studies, studying translation based on narratology has become a new perceptive. For example, Mona Baker has studied the important role narrative plays in translation and interpretation from communication and cognition perspectives in her academic monograph Translation and Conflict:a Narrative Account. However, in domestic translation studies, few has touched on the reproduction of narrative features in the Chinese translations with narratology as a tool for deconstructing the source text.With Genette’s narrative theory as the theoretical foundation, this thesis first analyzes Woolf’s classic stream-of-consciousness novel The Waves from three aspects: narrative time, narrative focalization, and poetic narrative features. With the two versions of The Waves translated by Wu Junxie and Cao Yuanyong as study objects, this thesis tries to study whether the narrative features of the source text are reproduced, and tries to find out concrete translation strategies specific to s stream-of-consciousness novels.