narrative

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020), the novel about Shakespeare’s son and wife, is considered as the continuation of postmodernist interest in Shakespeare exemplified by A. Burgess’s and R. Nye’s novels about the Bard. However, O’Farrell’s approach to history through the lens of everyday family life, her present-tense narrative and especially her manner of reinterpreting the historical facts all point to another, more recent literary influence – Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels.

The article deals with the most important problems of the novel of the famous English postmodernist J. Barnes - the question of the authenticity of the foundations of English and the unreliability of personal memory. It also traces how the narrative character of the memory reveals the construction of the national identity.

Stylistic tendencies typical for F. Iskander’s idiostyle are analyzed: epic narration and ironic modality. External and internal characteristics of narrative as well as different degrees and types of irony are considered.

The article studies the autobiographical book by Julian Barnes, the contemporary English postmodernist writer, where his personal memories illustrate the illusive nature of memory and its limits, revealing such mechanisms of memory as subjective interpretation, forgetting and imagining.

In the article the time structure of the novel Doctor Zhivago is examined in the context of Pasternak’s idea of imaginative reality. Time in the novel is presented as a row of interlacing mutually defining layers: the author’s time, the time of lyrical affection, the time of the characters, the reader’s time, breakthroughs to the Eternity create a complex unity of the narrative structure.