從瞬間到永恒—解讀到燈塔去中弗吉尼亞伍爾夫的生命觀

1、 1Chapter 1 Introduction Virginia Woolf is considered as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and is receiving more and more attention from around the world. Her works have received great critical interest fro

2、m her own time to the present. This chapter starts from a brief introduction of Virginia Woolf and one of her best works To the Lighthouse (1927), and then it presents a brief literature review of Woolf studies at home a

3、nd abroad, and finally it introduces the theme and organization of this thesis. 1.1 Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse “Shakespeare was like Nature…Novelists have seldom been made Nature in this sense…the same claim mi

4、ght be made for Mrs. Woolf” (CH, 301). William Empson, at the rather beginning of a review in 1931, highly praised Virginia Woolf by comparing her to Shakespeare. Virginia Woolf, now recognized as a representative writer

5、 of modernism, was already winning renown during her lifetime which spanned Victorian and modern times. Since her death in 1941, Virginia Woolf has been receiving persistent and increasing attention and praises from both

6、 readers and the critic circle, and her stature as a modernist writer grew rapidly in the recent decades. Virginia Woolf is considered as a major modern writer mainly for her achievement in novels. Among her novels, To t

7、he Lighthouse published in 1927 is one of the most widely read, and has constantly been receiving praises. It is a highly poetic fiction which Virginia Woolf would like to invent a new name to supplant “novel”. “A new—by

8、 Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” (D3, 34). Virginia Woolf has written this semiautobiographical novel in remembrance of her parents as she claimed before writing that 3voyage to the lighthouse. While Mr. Ramsay reaches

9、 the lighthouse, Lily draws a line in the centre and finishes her painting. Virginia Woolf herself, pleased with the novel, while redoing the manuscript in November 1926, said in her diary that it is easily the best of

10、 my books, fuller than J.’s R. and less spasmodic…I have no idea of any other to follow it: which may mean that I have made my method perfect, & it will now stay like this, & serve whatever use I wish to put it t

11、o. (D3, 117) Another day in 1927 she expressed her gratification again: “Dear me, how lovely some parts of The Lighthouse are! Soft & pliable, & I think deep, and never a word wrong for a page at a time” (D3, 13

12、2). Leonard Woolf, being the first reader of To the Lighthouse, claimed without Virginia Woolf’s asking that it is “the best book” of Virginia Woolf and it is a “masterpiece” (D3, 123). Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sis

13、ter, also agreed with Leonard Woolf and she wrote to Virginia that “I think it is your best work…I am excited and thrilled and taken into another world as one only is by a great work of art” (L3, 573). Besides these prai

14、ses from close relatives, Times Literary Supplement reviewed favourably right on the day of the novel’s publication that “To the Lighthouse is as elastic as a novel can be” (CH, 193). To the Lighthouse also received high

15、 praises from many other novelists. Even some normally unfriendly critics such as Arnold Bennett reviewed favourably, “I have read a bunch of novels. I must say, despite my notorious grave reservations concerning Virgini

16、a Woolf, that the most original of the bunch is To the Lighthouse. It is the best book of hers that I know” (CH, 200). If all these praises could not assure Virginia Woolf of the success of the novel, then, the Prix Femi

17、na it received in 1928 may have been a better reward to her. The novel was so successful that from the proceeds of the first edition of To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf was able to buy a new car (Goldman, 2008: 36). To