Children of fin de siècle: the image and metaphor of the child in the literature at the turn of the twentieth century

Гальчук, Оксана Василівна (2022) Children of fin de siècle: the image and metaphor of the child in the literature at the turn of the twentieth century Колективна (три і більше авторів). Moderní aspekty vědy: XXIV. Díl mezinárodní kolektivní monografie, Видавнича група Наукові перспективи, Чехія, Czech Republic.

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Анотація

The article explores the image of a child in the works of literature on the turn of the twentieth century. The goal is to determine the correlation of this image with writers’ search for answers to the challenges of time and to analyze the authors’ variants of artistic implementation of the concept of a child/childhood in the works of the century turn. The texts of modernism monitor the transformation of a child’s image into a concept that embodies the ambivalent nature of the transition period., The article aims to analyze the specifics of children’s theme in R. L. Stevenson, R. Kipling, O. Wilde, Mark Twain, E. Zola, G. de Maupassant, T. Hardy, applying historical, literary, comparative, archetypal and psychoanalytic methods of research. In their works, the interpretation of a child’s image of is conditioned by the genre specificity of works; controversy with the traditions of predecessors; the aesthetic program of the authors. It has been proven that developing a realistic tradition in new social and cultural conditions, G. de Maupassant, E. Zola develop a figurative paradigm of children – victims of society. Thus, in the novel Germinal the fates of miners’ children of serve as an expression of the main topic ‘struggle of labor vs. capital’. While Maupassant, actualizing social and moral and ethical issues, creates a whole gallery of characters of bastards in his novelistic. As a social type, they also turn into a symbol of a person’s feeling of themselves as being left without any care of the father-god at the turn of centuries. In contrast to the images of victims who do not have any future, the characters by the neo-romantics R. L. Stevenson (Treasure Island) and Mark Twain (trilogy about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) are active in their struggle for their own belief and trying to overcome the gap between the ideal and the reality. However, such an image of a victorious child is not devoid of ironic intonation: it serves as a protagonist of the historical-adventure genre or a work conceived as a parody of ‘school novels’. Instead, Mowgli, the hero of R. Kipling (The Jungle Book), is such a type of character as a child-demiurge. As an author’s allusion of Prometheus, he creates his own world-cosmos in the ‘alien’ one. M. Maeterlinck (Blue Bird) offers symbolically-archetypal interpretation of the image of a child as a hero who is able to go in search of true happiness and grasp the past. It is rather a mask of a person of the future. Innovative is the motive of ‘childhood’ as a moral immaturity of the character. In the Picture of Dorian Gray by O. Wilde, the hero not being able to distinguish between good and evil becomes part of evil himself. While Tess from the novel by T. Hardy embodies the idyllic-patriarchal past mercilessly destroyed by a pragmatic modernity. Thus, the works of the century borderline show that, rethinking the tradition of literal interpretation of a child character, the authors more often resort to its metaphorization and symbolization.

Тип елементу :	Монографія (Колективна (три і більше авторів))
Ключові слова:	modernism; image of a child; child as a metaphor; concept of ‘childhood’; authors’ representations; myth-making
Типологія:	Це архівна тематика Київського університету імені Бориса Грінченка > Монографії > Видані за кордоном (окрім країн СНД)
Підрозділи:	Це архівні підрозділи Київського університету імені Бориса Грінченка > Факультет української філології, культури і мистецтва > Кафедра світової літератури
Користувач, що депонує:	професор Оксана Гальчук
Дата внесення:	11 Жов 2022 11:15
Останні зміни:	11 Жов 2022 11:15
URI:	https://elibrary.kubg.edu.ua/id/eprint/41933

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