Tsareva E. V.

Document and fiction in Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat  P. 127-136/

UDC 821.111-31.09«19»

DOI 10.37724/RSU.2023.80.3.013

Abstract. The article is devoted to a book written by the modern British writer Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat (2019). The relevance of the work lies in the current need to comprehend the genre of the book, its artistic and stylistic bases, which have not been fully addressed by contemporary scholarship. The purpose of the work is to identify the relationship between fiction and document in the book The Man in the Red Coat. The conclusion to the research substantiates that the text of the book is based on interpenetration of artistic and documentary principles. The paper shows that this artistic principle is presented in Barnes’s book at various levels and in a variety of forms and means. First of all, these are the features of his narrative strategy. Secondly, the artistic principle in the book is provided by referring to a wide range of literary sources (intertextuality). Equally significant means embrace the use of intermedial tropes, allusions to painting, photography, music and, in general, to all arts at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. The list of precedent texts, paintings of and music embrace a wide range of French and British authors at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. In addition, the very opening of the book is characterized by figurativeness, brightness and expressive language, the irony inherent in the author’s style, etc. Thus, the paper proves that the book rests on both documentary and poetic bases. The results of the research can be further applied in teaching history of foreign literature and specifically J. Barnes’s works.

 

Keywords: British literature, J. Barnes, intertextuality, intermedial tropes, narrative strategy, non-fiction.

 

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