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License Agreement on scientific materials use.
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The image of the mother in contemporary English-language literature
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Natalia Nikolaevna Nikolina
Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin, Ekaterinburg
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Submitted:
April 4, 2025
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Abstract.
In Western literature, the image of the mother is never neutral; its position is always relative to the “good mother / bad mother” opposition. Researchers note the evolution of the image, its destruction in the postmodern era, and the relevance of the bad mother image in contemporary English-language works. The aim of this study is to describe the image of the mother in contemporary works of fiction written in English. The study analyzed maternal images in novels such as Nick Hornby’s “About a Boy” (1998), Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” (2003), Emma Donoghue’s “Room” (2010), Michelle Sacks’s “All the Lost Things” (2019), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun” (2021). The scientific novelty of the study lies in identifying the features of the literary image of the mother in contemporary English-language literature. The results of the study are the theoretical and empirical generalizations regarding the image of the mother in literature and, in particular, in contemporary English-language novels, where the image of the mother is often the image of the “abandoning mother”, who either leaves her child in the care of others or commits suicide. The image of the mother is also associated with the motif of determining the fate of one’s child, in which there is no single right solution.
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Key words and phrases:
современная зарубежная литература
англоязычный роман
образ матери
образ отсутствующей матери
образ покидающей матери
contemporary foreign literature
English-language novel
image of the mother
image of the absent mother
image of the abandoning mother
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