New Names of British Literature: “The Unfinished Novel” of Helen Dunmore

Abstract

The article presents a thematically focused review of some novels by an English writer Helen Dunmore. It focuses on the central motifs and key ideas in the novels Zennor in Darkness, The Lie, The Greatcoat, The Siege and The Betrayal, the protagonists of which are placed in critical and tragic periods in the history of the twentieth century: the First and Second World Wars, the siege of Leningrad and the end of the Stalinist regime. Despite the differences in the chronotopes and heroes’ nationalities, these novels create a single supertext – a general semantic formation, the integrity of which is determined by such motifs as human consciousness during war, the return of the ghosts of the dead, the overwhelming fear during historical cataclysms. Keywords: H. Dunmore, a person in history, supertext, motif, typical character.