REPRESENTATION OF FEAR AND ANXIETY IN FICTIONAL NARRATIVE (BASED ON EARLY 20TH CENTURY ENGLISH PROSE)

Abstract

The article considers means of representing in fictional narrative the basic emotion of fear and the emotional state of anxiety regarded as one of its forms. The relevance of the chosen topic is determined by the interest of contemporary linguistics in studying ways of expressing emotional states, including their representations in literary texts. Research is based on four English short stories of the first half of the previous century. Two of the selected stories, namely, “I Spy” by G. Greene and “After 20 Years” by O. Henry, are regarded as examples of action-packed prose, the stories “A Day’s Wait” by E. Hemingway and “Eveline” by J. Joyce are examples of psychological fiction. Methods of structural, linguistic, semiotic and hermeneutic analysis reveal that fear and anxiety are verbalized differently in literary texts. It is shown that words belonging to the lexical-semantic groups “anxiety” and “fear” are not the only means of representing the internal states experienced by the characters. Emotional tension is created primarily by syntactic and stylistic means, as well as with the help of symbolic words, through descriptions of the characters’ speech, gestures and body movements. It is stressed that in psychological prose the emotions of fear and anxiety experienced by characters are usually implicit but can be reconstructed from the text as a result of analysis.