REPRESENTATION OF ENEMY IMAGE IN BRITISH NEWSPAPER DISCOURSE OF THE CRIMEAN WAR

Abstract

The provisions of linguistic imagology, which determine the verbal means of the ‘enemy’ image forming in the public mind served as the article theoretical basis. The analysis of the studies by J.-M. Carré, M.-F. Guyard, H. Dyzerinck, J. Leerssen is carried out. They trace the thought that the collective idea of a hetero-image is conditioned by the specifics of the national auto-image model and the historical moment, which are reflected in the media discourse of a particular time period. A comparative analysis of the “stereotype”, “image”, “representation” concepts is made. The practical part of the study deals with verbal mechanisms of introducing stereotypes into social consciousness on the examples of the publications in the mid-19th century leading British tabloids The Daily News and The Times. During the Crimean campaign, Great Britain, which was at war with Russia, aimed to form in its society an unfriendly image of a rival state, which was realized through the text-semantic ideologization of the media space of that time. A complex imagotypical structure of the enemy portrayal was created on the pages of the English newspapers by “blurring down” the readers’ perception of the Russian territorial space, the demonization and “barbarization” of the Russian ruler, the primitivization of the Russian soldiers and army, the mythologization of meaningful objects for Great Britain, such as the Crimea and Sevastopol. Current civilizational processes actualize research in the field of a social mental model formation with the help of linguistic techniques.