Literary Precedent in the Artistic Whole of Graham Swift’s Novella Mothering Sunday

Abstract

The article analyzes Graham Swift's novella from the point of view of the story's plot and narrative dialogue with the works of R. L. Stevenson and J. Conrad, the texts serving as precedents for this work by a modern British author about the formation of a writer, the formation of his aesthetic credo, and by and large – about the dialectic of life and its literary and figurative interpretation; about the relationship between truth and fiction; about the ambiguity of a word in a literary work. It shows how fruitful the dialogue between the text of a literary work and its "precedents" is in general, and what an important role precedent texts play in shaping the artistic whole of the analyzed story in particular.