2017 Issue №1

This article examines the value system hierarchy of one of the novel’s central characters, who is often considered a ‘projection’ of the author’s personality. Oppositions emerging in the character’s mind (war/peace, lie/truth, earth/sky, greatness/worthlessness, glory/vanity), which are identified in the course of analysis, make it possible to track changes in the character’s worldview and its evolution along his way to harmony.

The author examines Evelyn Waugh's novel Decline and Fall from the imagological point of view. The author identifies and analyses ethnic stereotypes reflected in the images of members of ‘other’ peoples and races. The article stresses that the novel’s system of cultural images of ‘others’ should be analysed in connection with the heterostereotypes of English culture and the philosophic and historical categories of civilization and barbarism.

This article identifies the role of ekphrasis, based on its selected functions — the chronotop, didactic, metanarrative, and storyline ones. An analysis of short stories by J. Barnes, J. Fowles and A. S. Byatt carried out within such a framework makes it possible to speak of a connection between ekphrasis and various structural levels of a work and its contribution to the creation of literary meanings.

Through analysing the mechanisms of reception of modern Russian literature in Chinese literary criticism, the author shows that a Chinese reader has a predisposition to understand texts in the context of the urgent national problem of preserving traditions. This predisposition affects the interpretation and perception of new rustic prose, female prose, and postmodernist literature. The study’s methodological framework combines the principles of comparative literary studies, communication theory, and receptive aesthetics with certain ideas of M. M. Bakhtin. The works is based on research articles, monographs, and theses of Chinese authors, published in the 2000s.