A Fated Journey Of Empire:a Postcolonial Study Of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf, a famous novelist, essayist and critic, has long been celebrated as a major modernist writer and a feminist pioneer of the early20th century. During Woolf’s59years of lifetime, she published many novels, essays, letters and criticism. Among all her works, To the Lighthouse is considered as the masterpiece of her stream-of-consciousness novels which depicts the Ramsays and their guests spending holidays on an island of Scotland. It has been broadly studied from the viewpoint of its poetic language, aesthetics, symbolism, and feminism by many researchers in recent years.This thesis chooses another angle to analyze the social and political elements of the novel. By reading To the Lighthouse from the perspective of postcolonialism, an overall impression of Woolf s conception of empire and a deeper and different understanding of this great and remarkable work can be clear in mind. Woolf did not only present a glorious image of Great Britain, but also revealed its hidden crisis and troubles to predict that the Empire of the sun would finally fall down into the tide of history. In terms of postcolonialism, the voyage to the lighthouse is a fated journey of Empire.