Elmira V. Vasil’eva, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya Street, 25 a, 121069, Moscow, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4195-5658
The work was financially supported by the grant from the Government of the Russian Federation (agreement No. 23-28-00989, 14.06.2022, implementation period 2023–2024) “English Classical Literature in World Culture: Receptions, Transformations, Interpretations”. The article provides a comparative analysis of the chronotopes of two famous American horror novels of the 20 th century – Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives. The chronotope of an evil house and the chronotope of an evil town, respectively, are viewed as two variants of the Gothic chronotope of the castle, peculiarly received in and assimilated by the American literary tradition. Both Jackson and Levin carefully reproduce in their texts certain characteristics integral to the chronotope of the castle (namely, “the sentient house” motif, the motif of a dark and gloomy past defining the present, the effect of spatial and temporal isolation of the location from the outer world), which illustrates the relationship of “lineal succession” between British Gothic and American horror fiction. The article also suggests, that the “evil house” and the “evil town” as chronotopes retain their genre-forming function, consolidating the poetics of two popular subgenera – “haunted mansion” and “small-town horror”.
gothic novel; the chronotope of the castle; poetics of space; horror novel; Shirley Jackson; Ira Levin.
14.09.2024
20.10.2024
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