Presentation of Space in E.A. Poe's Horror Stories

Abstract

Introduction. The article is devoted to the consideration of the category of space in E.A. Poe's prose. On the example of horror stories, the role of artistic space in the author's linguistic picture of the world is determined and its key structural and semantic characteristics are revealed. The relevance of the research is connected with the growing interest in the ways and means of conceptualizing reality in a literary text, to the problems of the artistic genre and to the specifics of the author's idiostyle.Methodology and sources. The main research methods are semantic analysis, which consists in determining the key binary spatial oppositions, and functional-stylistic analysis, focused on identifying ways and means of representing artistic space in the works of E.A. Poe. The empirical basis of the study was stories written in the genre of horror literature: “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “William Wilson”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “Berenice”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Oval Portrait”.Results and discussion. During the analysis, it was found that in E.A. Poe's stories, the representation of space is based on the inseparable relationship of its objective description by the author with his subjective perception of the hero/narrator and is characterized by an abundance of emotionally evaluative and perceptual vocabulary that verbalizes a large range of anxiety states. To the significant techniques of spatial modeling in the stories of E.A. Poe should be attributed to the polarization of space, realized in texts through semantic binary oppositions “open-closed”, “inside-outside”, “top-bottom”, as well as its deformation and hyperbolization.Conclusion. Space appears in E.A. Poe's stories as the most important parameter of conceptualization of reality. The surrounding world in the author's horror literature is inseparable from the images of Gothic literature, which is expressed not only in the use of the chronotope “castle”, in a number of texts transformed into the chronotope “bad house”, but also in the implementation of its motivic complex.