V. Woolf’s Literary Interpretation of the Body without Limits: A Conceptual Study

This research focuses on the specific features of literary representation of human body in the literary texts of the English modernist writer Virginia Woolf. The research is aimed at the analysis of linguistic aspects of corporeality as the basis of imagery formation in literary text by means of studying the ways of conceptualization of the HUMAN BODY domain in V. Woolf’s literary prose. The aim is realized with the methods of semantic and cognitive types of linguistic analyses applied, which imply the process of reconstruction of conceptual metaphors in the text. The results obtained demonstrated that HUMAN BODY is metaphorically represented as the BODY WITHOUT LIMITS by means of the images of a “deformed” or “shapeless” BODY, which in V. Woolf’s figurative interpretation reveal the correlation of physical “losing limits” with the depressive and unstable states of mind and soul of the individual.