THE CONCEPT “WOMAN” IN ENGLISH LITERATURE (BASED ON THE NOVEL BY A. S. BYATT “POSSESSION”)

Abstract

The article focuses on the evolutional features of the lingual and cultural concept “woman” in English literature in the novel by A.S.Byatt “Possession”. The etymology of the megaconcept “woman” and its nuclear zone are defined – mesoconcepts «female», «servant», «wife», interactions and development of which were tracked in the conceptosphere of the novel. As a result, their main features such as binary, associative, hierarchical nature are distinguished. Our aim is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the textual megaconcept “woman” in the novel by A.S.Byatt “Possession”. The results obtained demonstrate the interaction of such inner mesoconcepts as «female», «servant», «wife», which reveals their binary, associative, hierarchical nature. Each of the mesoconcepts pointed out has a set of interactive components which exist in the state of continuous development.

Functional method is used to provide the procedure of our research. The analysis is performed on three levels: hyper-textual, textual and hypotextual. Hypotextual level involve phonetic, graphic and lexical and semantic contexts; textual level can be manifested in compositional, characterological, chronotopic (time and place) contexts; hypertextual level involve the context of genre and style tradition, the context of the author’s creative activity and international genre and style context.

The interaction of the conceptual components is manifested by means of characterological context on textual level: the women in the novel represent the mesoconcepts under consideration being the embodiment of these three images. As a result, we point out such traits of the concepts as their binary, associative and hierarchical nature, which are represented on each level of our analysis. We can also conclude that the traits revealed are not stable, they are shown in the state of their development, which can be seen as a complex continuous process with several stages to be investigated separately.