The Sense of Reading Two Things at the Same Time: Narrative, Visual and Intertextual Space in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

This book is an attempt at a spatial reading of Virginia Woolf's novel ‘To the Lighthouse'. The spatial structure of the novel will be revealed through the concepts of narratology and intertextuality. The narratological approach borrows terms from Gérard Genette, Shlomith Rimmon- Kenan, Jakob Lothe and Morten Nøjgaard. Key concepts are mood, voice, focalization, internal and external space, structural key elements and the notion of an imaginary world. The intertextual approach uses concepts from Julia Kristeva and M. M. Bakhtin, mainly focusing on structural intersections between texts and the idea of the ambivalent word. The textual interlacing between ‘To the Lighthouse' and several other texts will be explored: Woolf‘s other novels ‘Mrs Dalloway' and ‘The Waves', in addition to poems by John Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The reading covers the overall spatial structure of the novel; the nature of narrative space; how characterization becomes a spatial matter; the position of the narrator; placement of objects, their importance as structural elements and how they become art objects; and last, the significance of Romantic structure in ‘To the Lighthouse'.