Does the Cover Really Matter? "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf: Approaches to Visual Representation

Virginia Woolf’s novel “To the Lighthouse” is one of the key texts that determined the main ways of developing the literature of European modernism. The writer’s novelty lies within the fact that she relied on aesthetic principles in her creative practice and tried to implement the stylistic techniques of experimental painting of the first third of the twentieth century. The interaction between word and image turned out to be an important channel of communication for the author, which acquired various forms in her work. In particular, this can be traced through the close attention to the design of book covers. The present research looks into publishing strategies for the visual representation of the novel “To the Lighthouse” from the perspective of interaction between verbal text and visual image. The bibliological study “Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation” by G. Genette served as a theoretical basis for the iconographic analysis of the covers of the novel “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf. His ideas helped to understand how the image on the cover can affect the reader’s experience of interpreting the text: from understanding the author’s idea of the work to forming ideas about the aesthetic concept of the writer, a particular artistic community, artistic direction or even an entire cultural era. This approach has also demonstrated the ethical and aesthetic flaws and findings of publishers in the context of marketing strategies for the intellectual positioning of the book.

Key words: publishing strategies; cover design; paratext; visual representation; British modernism.