Narrative Aspects of the Novels by Lucy Maud Montgomery and Eleanor Porter

Abstract

The metamodernist mood of the modern era increasingly clearly correlates with the transformation of literary methodologies and methods of reading, analysis, and interpretation of literary texts. The study of the genre specificity of the novel is one of the essential segments of the latest scientific studies, given its flexibility and significant textual representation in various national works of literature. This paper offers a critical review of the key stages in the history of the study of the novel as a literary genre, as well as shows the possibilities of understanding the poetic aspects of the author’s style. The material of the research relies on the novels by the Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery and the US writer Eleanor Porter. Both authors belonged to the same historical and cultural era; their work has many typological parallels due to objective factors. At the same time, the modernist worldview was embodied in each stylistic manner in its own way. Comparison of individual styles makes it possible to carry out a typological analysis within a particular genre with access to the study of common sources of image creation, as well as modeling the interpretive paradigm of metamodernism in the projection on the literature of different historical periods taking into account national characteristics. At the same time, the research opens up the prospect of expanding the methodological horizons of narratology for its progress beyond its “boundaries”: outside of literary studies, in a significant context, as well as in space outside of fiction.