Provider: - Institution: - Data provided by Europeana Collections- The thesis is concerned with the modernist novels of British writer Virginia Woolf, with the aim of proving that this novelist’s modernist literature is based upon the concept of interface – a two-way relationship between body and city. Especially emphasised is the fact that the thesis deals with the novels written in a modernist manner, as precisely these works contribute to the omnipresence of the body-city linkage and its presentation on the fictional scene. The novels selected for the research are the following: Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, Flush, and The Years. The key methods used during the research are: definition, concretisation, analysis, interpretation, and induction. The author defines the main hypothesis and the sub-hypotheses, the goals of the research and the concepts it uses; the author’s claims are concretised through the examples of the relevant novels; the examples undergo analysis and interpretation; an overall conclusion is induced on the basis of the results gained. From Elizabeth Grosz, a contemporary theoretician, the paper borrows the term interface, used by Grosz to define the relationship between body and city, seen as a “two-way linkage“ or “cobuilding“ (Grosz 1992: 248). The study also accepts Grosz’s notions of body and city, body being understood as a certain integration of physical and psychosocial sides of a human subject, that is, as a “sociocultural artifact“ (Grosz 1992: 241), and city being understood as all living and non-living, material and non-material, concrete and abstract elements of an urban entity (Grosz 1992: 244). However, by considering a (not necessarily urban) building – the elementary unit of an urban form – a notional part of the city, and by recognising a fundamental relation of the acts of building/structuring and (de)structuring with the idea of city, the study extends the limits of Grosz’s city definition to a certain extent. The paper also makes use of John Fiske’s theory of popular culture, in which popular culture is seen as a product actively created in the encounter between people and the culture industry (Fisk 2001: 32), in a process in which individuals accept a product, at the same time modifying it to suit their own needs (Fisk 2001: 36). This theory makes it possible for popular culture to be interpreted as a field on which an interface between body and the city industry, represented by the culture industry, takes place. In addition, the study echoes some of Henry Bergson’s views on the relation between body and spirit, and uses some of the definitions of urbanism – the study of city. In order to prove its main hypothesis, the paper provides arguments in favour of its stated sub-hypotheses, within eight thematically different chapters. The first chapter points out the fact that the characters of the selected novels are dominantly placed within a city, whereas the city rules over the characters’ lives. The relationship between the characters and the city is shown in close-up and from two opposing perspectives – from the point of view of a body that plays a certain role in the city, and from the standpoint of the city that enters a relationship with an urban body. The novels analysed are Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob’s Room, Flush, and Orlando. The second chapter offers the arguments in favour of the claim that the relationship between body and city exists even in the novels which are not built upon an urban ground, or that it exists in non-urban segments of the novels mainly set in a city environment. The arguments are based upon the analysis of To the Lighthouse and Orlando. The third chapter makes an attempt to prove that the concept of the body-city interface forms the base of formally the most experimental of Virginia Woolf’s novels – The Waves. In the analysis of the novel dominated by rhythm instead of plot, the characters are seen as differentiated aspects of one human personality, of which the most distinguished are the natural and the urban human trait. The chapter tends to prove that of the two aspects it is the urban one that prevails. The fourth chapter points out that the interface between body and city predominates as a notion in Virginia Woolf’s modernist works even when the novelist deals with the theme of seclusion and inaccessibility of human soul. By emphasising that interface is by definition a two-way relationship between two different (id)entities, and that each individual tends to preserve their own identity during the communication with the (urban) outside world, the chapter attempts to prove that many among Woolf’s heroes possess a tendency towards social isolation and identity preservation. The isolation, however, does not indicate a halt in the interface; on the contrary, it shows an ever-lasting character of its existence. The chapter analyses Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Flush, and The Waves. The fifth chapter concerns The Years, with a view to proving that the body-city interface constitutes the basis for this later novel, which, in spite of its greater dependence on historical facts, remains a modernist work. The sixth chapter deals with some elements of popular culture in the selected novels, understanding popular culture as one of the points of interface between body and its (urban) environment, that is, in terms of Fiske’s implications. The arguments are based upon the analysis of Mrs. Dalloway, The Years, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. The subject matter of the seventh chapter are the motifs of clothing and fashion as highly significant aspects of Virginia Woolf’s fiction writing, which, at the same time, function as a zone of interface between the novels’ bodies and the city/ies they inhabit. The chapter analyses Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob’s Room, Orlando, Flush, and The Years. Last but not least, the eighth chapter is concerned with some details of all of the selected novels in which body and city are identified with each other in a verbal, metaphorical, and/or symbolic sense. The results of the research within these eight chapters are the following: - the characters of Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob’s Room, Flush, and Orlando are dominantly placed within a city or they are influenced by a city space, whereas the urban environment and its elements have an important role in the characters’ lives; - the characters of To the Lighthouse and the title hero of Orlando are inextricably linked to a building – the elementary unit of an urban form. The Lighthouse – the building which the characters of the first novel tend to reach in a physical sense – functions as an imaginary space filled with personal wishes, while Orlando constantly leans, both physically and emotionally, on his/her family house, as a symbol of the character’s linkage to his/her native land; - in the battle between two dominant aspects of the many-sided human personality of The Waves, the one that wins is the urban side – the tendency towards city and the development of social relations; - social isolation, a characteristic of Jacob Flanders, Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith, Flush and Elizabeth Barrett, and of some protagonists of The Waves, functions as a constitutive part, a fact, and an indication of the interface between these characters and the city in question; - the body-city relation forms the basis for the theme dealt with in The Years – the theme of social changes at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, while the relationship between the characters and the city creates the dominant background of the presented changes; - Mrs. Dalloway and Londoners, the Ramsay mother and son, Rose Pargiter, and the characters of The Waves unconsciously create instances of popular culture, modifying the look and/or the meaning of the products or services offered by the urban environment; - in Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob’s Room, Orlando, Flush, and The Years, clothing, fashion, or even the natural fur serve as important signifiers of the fictional body and its feelings towards itself and the others, thus also representing the body-city interface; - in Jacob’s Room, The Years, Mrs. Dalloway, Flush, and Orlando, there is a verbal and/or figurative identification of characters with their rooms; in Jacob’s Room, The Years, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves, a body and a building frequently change places or roles, while life is often felt in terms of building/structuring and destructuring; finally, in Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Flush, The Years, The Waves, and Orlando, a city in its entirety is identified with (a) body and (a) life. On the basis of the given results issuing from separate chapters and proving the sub-hypotheses, the paper derives the following conclusion as to the experimental novels of Virginia Woolf: (1) the body constantly belongs to the city, whereas the city dominantly inhabits the body; (2) the body is strongly connected to the building as a notional and material base of the city, notwithstanding the (non)urban environment; (3) the concept of the body-city interface forms the base of a novel entirely dependent on rhythm instead of plot; (4) the body’s isolation from the city as a dominant theme of the given novels is, at the same time, one of the pillars of the body’s interface with the city; (5) the main theme of a later modernist novel is rooted in the body-city interface; (6) elements of popular culture function as frequent actors on the fictional scene, which means that they also constitute one of the fields of the body-city interface; (7) clothing and fashion as significant motifs of these novels also serve as a large zone where the body and the city meet each other; finally, (8) the body and the city in Virginia Woolf’s modernist novels frequently swap places in a verbal, metaphorical, and/or symbolic sense. The inductive conclusion based upon the preceding inferences would be as follows: the conception of int