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Abstract
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The examination of social and cultural change in To the Lighthouse through Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism is not merely a theoretical exercise—it is a necessary intervention into ongoing debates about literature’s capacity to register, resist, and reshape historical forces. As Greenblatt asserts, “Every work of art is a social event, and every interpretation is a historical act” (Learning to Curse 4). To read Woolf’s novel exclusively as interior monologue or formal experiment risks effacing its profound engagement with the seismic shifts of early twentieth-century Britain: the collapse of imperial confidence, the destabilization of gender roles, the redefinition of domestic labor, and the lingering trauma of the Great War. This research contends that only through a New Historicist lens—attentive to the circulation of social energy between text and context—can we fully grasp how Woolf’s narrative functions as both symptom and critique of its historical moment.
The significance of this inquiry lies in its capacity to correct longstanding misreadings of modernism as apolitical or inward-turning. Traditional formalist approaches have often treated To the Lighthouse as a retreat from history into the sanctuary of consciousness (e.g., Abrams 213). Yet Greenblatt’s insistence that “the literary text is implicated in the networks of power it seems to transcend” (Shakespearean Negotiations 6) compels a revision: Woolf does not escape history—she re-mediates it. Crucially, this study responds to a methodological gap: while New Historicism has transformed Renaissance scholarship, its application to early twentieth-century women’s writing remains underdeveloped. Extending Greenblatt’s framework beyond its Elizabethan-Jacobean provenance not only tests the theory’s adaptability, but also challenges periodizing assumptions that relegate historicist critique to pre-modern archives. Woolf’s modernism—attuned to the dislocations of war, feminism, and decolonization—provides a
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