Portrait descriptions in poetry and prose of England of the XVI-XIX centuries: from Shakespeare to Byron (the influence of trends of the past on the present)

Abstract

The description of the portrait of a literary character plays an important role in creating the overall image of the character. The urgency of the study is due to the anthropocentric direction of linguistic studies since reflection and interpretation of the existing world and descriptions of portraits play an important role in this. In this sense, it is necessary to analyze the use of linguistic units in the description of portraits of characters from English fiction and poetry in the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries and to know the influence of past trends in the present. During the study several general scientific methods were used: analogy, generalization, observation, comparison, experiment, analysis, and the historical method. The study analyzed portrait descriptions in English poetry and prose from the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and found that writers used a variety of symbols to capture the author's intentions in characters. Often, the authors used somatic vocabulary to represent the appearance of the characters, the less used lexical units of the general characteristics of the portrayal of the characters and the least to represent the appearance of the characters used the kinetic vocabulary.