Virginia Woolf and the great war:Cchange and disillusionment in a modernist perspective

Having made invaluable contributions to the artistic circles of her time, Virginia Woolf has been regarded as one of the most prominent modernists of the 20th century. Considering that her first modernist novel (Jacob's Room) is published in 1914, her work was inevitably written under the influence of the Great War conducing a sense of change and disillusionment which became an inextricable part of the modernist perspective. As such, this thesis study aims to analyze the essence of the Great War, the sense of change and disillusionment as modernist elements within Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. To this end, the link between the Great War and modernist novel is examined through the concepts of change and disillusionment within each novel. Keywords: Modernism, change, disillusionment, the Great War, Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse.