Foregrounding In To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf, as a forerunner in modernist literature of the 20th century and a central member of the Bloomsberry Group, with her special grace and style, is heatedly criticized in the Western critical circle. She is remarkably prolific and versatile with her works covering novels, short stories and essays. Her fifth novel, To the Lighthouse, written in Woolf's artistic maturation, is one of the most brilliant works in her writing career and embodies her artistic creed of writing.As Geoffrey Leech puts it, foregrounding, or motivated deviation from linguistic or other socially accepted norms, has been claimed to be a basic principle of aesthetic communication (A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry 56-57). Foregrounded linguistic features, which stand out from the background by either breaking the accepted linguistic rule (deviation) or enforcing the rule by repetition or parallelism at various linguistic levels, offer their special advantages in literary analyses. Therefore, an analysis of literary works from the perspective of foregrounding theory is possible as well as significant.The present thesis attempts to study the foregrounding operations in To the Lighthouse based on the foregrounding theory by drawing on Leech's foregrounding theories in four chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the musical phonological foregrounding in the work. It consists of two parts, with emphasis on the multitudinous phonemic repetitions and chiasmus. Chapter 2 explores the revelatory syntactic foregrounding in the work, which is embodied in the expansive sentence structure, repetition and parallelism. Chapter 3 mainly surveys foregrounding at its deeper rhetoric level, with emphasis on the metaphorical deviation and symbolism. Chapter 4 interprets foregrounding at the stylistic level. In it, the thesis scrutinizes the kaleidoscopic narrative techniques and deviant ternary structure.The thesis holds that Woolf's linguistic inventiveness is extensively and effectively carried out in To the Lighthouse, covering those features at every aspect of language. Those foregrounded linguistic features are novel, vivid and expressive. Usually invested with rich cultural implications, they are conducive to portraying characters or foregrounding themes.Hopefully, the thesis based on the foregrounding theory with an analysis of the language and style in To the Lighthouse may enhance our understanding of Woolf and her artistic idea of writing.