Author(s) :

DA-YOUNG CHOI.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

This narrative review examines the ways that Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse expose human consciousness in different linguistic and stylistic modes: soliloquy and stream of-consciousness. Relying on A. C. Bradley’s interpretation of the soliloquy, William James’s conception of consciousness as a “stream,” and the aesthetics of modernism, this paper proposes that both the authors dramatize the limits of language in representing the mind. While Shakespeare’s soliloquies turn introspection into a form of theatrical performance, Woolf’s prose places the reader within a continuous f low of perception and memory. Positioned respectively within Renaissance humanism and post-war modernism, these methods are used to show that literature plays the important dual role of mirror and model. This review focuses primarily on how Hamlet and To the Lighthouse render consciousness visible through language shaped by historical and cultural context.