Transformation of the Victorian Text in the 20th-Century English Literature (On the Material of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman)…

The present article analyzes the phenomenon of the Victorian text in the 20th-century English literature. The aim of the research is to establish the nature of the intertextual dialogue between the Victorian text and the English literature of the first half of the 20th century. The study is conducted on the material of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, which are chosen to contrast realistic and postmodernist approaches to the Victorian text. The main methods of the research are contextual analysis and complex stylistic analysis based on the principles of foregrounding. First, the article outlines a list of the Victorian text typical features, then it focuses on the comparison of the transformation the Victorian text undergoes in Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga and Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman. Literature review demonstrates that the majority of researchers identify two principal variants of the intertextual dialogue between the Victorian text and the Neo-Victorian novel: nostalgic styliza-tion and interpretation or parody of the Victorian text. In order to identify which strategy is used by Galsworthy and Fowles, the authors of the present article analyzed the bildungsroman form of the novels under consideration, their systems of characters, the novel endings, narrative strategies, the settings of the novels. This study shows that on the conceptual and thematic levels both the novels are relatively close to the tradition of the Victorian text while on the level of the system of characters and narration considerable differences are observed. Galsworthy in most respects follows the Victorian literature tradition of plot construction, chronological development of the narration and setting, yet critically reevaluating some fundamental Victorian values, which influences his choice of the ending in The Forsyte Saga. Fowles chooses the second strategy of a postmodernist play with his reader and parodying the Victorian text. As a result, he borrows recognizable elements of the Victorian novel (bildungsroman, happy ending, setting) at the same time breaking principles of chronological development of the narration and omniscience of the narrator, which enables him to fill the old Victorian novel form with new existential content.

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