The article is devoted to the study of the poetic style of “flash fiction” of Rachel Joyce, an outstanding representative of modern British literature. The author of the article analyzes the expressive manner and peculiarities of style of seven short stories collected in the book “A Snow Garden and Other Stories” (2015). The plot of these stories is centered on Christmas, which is reasonable ground to consider them as a manifestation of the archetype of a Christmas story, a long-standing literary tradition. Joyce’s characters are every men who found themselves in a difficult situation on Christmas Eve. Their private and intimate stories are told against the festive background and longing for a miracle. The comparative and philological analysis of Joyce’s short stories, as well as the methodology of the historical and typological approaches to the texts under consideration enable the author of the article to reveal and dwell on such narrative techniques in Joyce’s arsenal as addressing the inner life and intimate feelings of non-status characters; expansion of the genre of a short story through its interaction and contamination with the genre of a novel; cinematografic montage; ironic allusions to precedent texts and objects and phenomena of mass culture; distorted chronology of events and prevalence of the present tense. All these techniquestestify to the influence of modernist and postmodernist aesthetic traditions on the genre of a Christmas story.
The contact details of authors:
кандидат педагогических наук, доцент кафедры английской филологии и переводоведения Чувашского государственного педагогического университета им. И. Я. Яковлева, г. Чебоксары, Россия; e-mail: kurnikova.n@gmail.com
