A Cultural Critique Of To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf is universally acknowledged as a canonical modernist writer whose works are seen as representing the value of high modernism. The present thesis works over Woolf s masterpiece To the Lighthouse through the perspective of cultural critique, analyzing the author's critical thinking of the cultural elitism ingrained in modernism in general, and of her own cultural identity in particular. Firstly, the thesis launches a general review of the critical heritage dedicated to this novel, in the hope of locating the critical vacancy, thereby the space for further analysis is exposed. The second part of the thesis is devoted to a critical reading of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, aiming at exploring Arnold's elite cultural stance and its impact on the social discourse of Britain. The third part of the thesis is a reevaluation of Woolf's cultural identity. Not only is "cultural identity" a critical term of the postcolonial theory, it is important too if a deeper understanding of the significance of the modernists' works is to be acquired. Adopting an analysis of Woolf's outsider's politics, the democratic idea embodied in her social work and literary works, and her engagement with mass culture, the thesis attempts to reveal the complexity and uncertainty of Woolf's cultural identity. The fourth part of the thesis is devoted to the interpretation of To the Lighthouse the novel, investigating the cultural significance of the modernists' literary outputs by means of textual analysis.