Parareality as a Structural and Semantic Component of Fantasy Genre Texts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31861/pytlit2024.109.058Keywords:
fantasy, magic, parareality, mythopoetics, semantic structure, genre variabilityAbstract
The paper is motivated by new perspectives in expanding the boundaries of the fantasy text analysis in the aspect of its structural and semantic components. Since the thematic context of fantasy is extremely broad, the research is predominantly focused on the plane of parareality, as a variable of the space-time continuum. The article delves into the specificity of pararealities in the texts by J. K. Rowling and S. Clarke. The common textual characteristic of the authors’ fantasy is the creation of parallel realities with the eternal confrontation between good and evil. However, J. K. Rowling offers a new, completely fictional world, the product of fictitious realities with a characteristic vagueness of geographical and temporal specificity. Instead, the novel “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” by S. Clarke clearly expresses the combination of historical and authorial contextualization (historical novel of the Napoleonic Wars and authentic mythopoetics). As a convergence of real history and fantasy genre the specific character of thematic, hermeneutic and stylistic components of the historical fantasy “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” indicates the transition from exemplification to modulation of the genre identity with the plenitude of its hypertextual links: imitation of the historical novel, compilation with fantasy format by means of mythological structures and images stylized as Celtic folklore, as well as its transformation into an alternate history. Overall, S. Clarke’s novel is considered as a fantasy genre variation with a conscious replacement of real historical events and conventional phenomena by hypothetical variations against the background of simulated pararealities.
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