Woolf in space: subversive interventions in the contemporary spatial constructions and discourses of the dominant socio-spatial order in virginia woolf’s fiction

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2021-1-26

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Özkaya, Rana

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Virginia Woolf is one of the leading figures of modernism, a way of seeing and representing the world characterized by the period’s breakdown of social norms, rejection of outdated social systems, disillusionment and alienation. Keenly aware of repressive social systems and unequal power relations functioning in practices and discourses of societies in various locations or territories, in and through her fiction Woolf analysed and criticized her more conventional contemporaries’ ways of producing and representing physical and mental space. The notion of “social space,” as developed by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1974), when sought in Woolf’s fiction reveals heterogeneous spatial experiences and perceptions, which differ in individuals of different gender, class and nationality. This study claims that Woolf’s novels lend themselves to a spatial analysis and they demonstrate and challenge the spatial codes and practices of dominant social systems that regulated the ways in which members of her society constructed and lived space, resulting in the idea that social space is heterogonous, multiple and dynamic, which is in line with the arguments of space theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan. For its theoretical and conceptual framework, the thesis also draws on the work of Gaston Bachelard, who attributes the house with certain fixed characteristics echoing the rigid construction of physical and mental space by the status quo, to demonstrate how Woolf critically exposes a suppressive power system whose ideologies are manifested and reproduced by conventional codes of thought about physical and mental space in her novels.

Subject Keywords

Space theories, Virginia woolf, Henri lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gaston Bachelard

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/89593

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

R. Özkaya, “Woolf in space: subversive interventions in the contemporary spatial constructions and discourses of the dominant socio-spatial order in virginia woolf’s fiction,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2021.