A Cognitive Poetic Study Of Self Space In To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf (1882-1942) was considered as a different writer with thepublication of her first novel. Among contemporary novelist, she is a curious andanomalous figure. She rejected the boundaries of traditional European narrative formand tried to create another way of writing to reveal the inner world of the characters’.Her works gained not only swift, but also persistent and increasing attention andpraise. As a most celebrated English woman writer, critic, proser and a pioneer offeminism, she has reached an outstanding achievement in writing, criticizing andliterary theory. She has long been celebrated as an innovative novelist and a radicalthinker who broke with the aesthetics of earlier generations and challenged traditionalvalues.To the Lighthouse, a lyrical novel which fully demonstrates Woof’ excellentskill by the way of its perfect balance of emotion and of form, is the most outstandingmaster piece with the style of the ‘stream of consciousness’. Since its publication in1930s, the book has gained a lot of attention. It has been studied from various pointsof review including narratology, aesthetics, feminism and so on. Different researchesrelive this book from different angles which greatly enrich the literary research onVirginia Woolf.With the rapid development of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, moreand more researchers have begun to study and analyze the literature text. MentalSpace Theory is an important part of cognitive poetics which concentrates on theprocess of meaning construction on the basis of cognitive activities. Base on thetheory of mental space theory, this thesis attempts to analyze the conceptual meaningconstruction and thematic meaning construction in the novel of To the Lighthouse soas to guide readers to reconstruct and interpret the inner value of feminist ideology ofVirginia Woolf.This thesis is composed of four parts. The first is introduction. In this part,Virginia Woolf’s works and her important position in the literary world are emphasized. Researches from home and abroad are presented in order to show thevarious aspects from which critics have been focusing on Woolf and her books. It alsointroduces the theory background—mental space theory and conceptual blendingtheory. The second part analyzes the cognitive tendency of “To the Lighthouse”.The third part applies the main notion of mental space theory to analyze the theme ofthe novel. The last part is the conclusion that Woolf maps and interrogates orthodoxintersections of romance, gender, war and life through the concrete voices of thisstory, showing precisely her pursuit of individual value. The expedition of going tothe lighthouse is a journey of constructing self space and construction of self space isthe guarantee of women’s independent which could be helpful for a real harmoniousworld.This paper applies mental space theory in analysis of the theme of To theLighthouse. It tries to help readers find out the underlying themes of the novelaccording to the integration of cognitive structural analysis and conceptual meaningconstruction. The present research hopes to provide a new perspective for interpretingand appreciating stream-of-consciousness discourse in literary texts.