The Great War and Women in Modern British Literature. A Case of Study: Virginia Woolf Selected Works: Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse

Abstract

The First World War definitively changed Britain in all spheres. As the number of men lost on the battlefield and the depletion of national financial resources led to a series of radical changes, and this, in turn, changed the course of the country and transferred it to another level, especially after women‘s intervention in all fields.Virginia Woolf was one of the greatest literary female artists in the early 20thcentury, pioneering the modern English literature with the stream-of-consciousness technique. Her representative works focused on the internal description of characters while presenting the social conditions of post-war Britain and embodying the role of women in all its attributes. This Master dissertation entitled The Great War, and Women in Modern British Literature. A Case of Study: Virginia Woolf selected Works: Mrs.Dalloway and To the Lighthouse aims initially at exploring and analyzing two famous classic novels by Woolf, which are Mrs.Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. These two novels had a great impact in the modern literture as Woolf produced two distinguished works that embodied a whole society andrepresented a tragic reality that was recorded in history. One of the ultimate aims of this study is to show Woolf's contribution in the literature, her accomplishments in the Feminist movement, and her unique portrayal of women in her literary works. Moreover, this study seeks to find how Woolf‘s novels influenced the British society and what is the impact of Mrs.Dalloway and To the Lighthouse on the reader in general. Besides, this study aims to analyze Woolf's applications of the various psychological theories that she has always adopted in her works, including the most important ones such as The Androgynous Mind‘s theory and The Oedipal complex theory