Topos and chronos of English country houseat the beginning of the XXth century in literature and cinema(the novel “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro and a film by James Ivory)

About the author

Anna S. Sholokhova (Moscow, Russia), PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2325-9619.

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Abstract

The Stately-house novel takes a special place in the English classical literature. The estate here is of key importance in the image-structure of the work. The world of an English estate is reflected as a multi-faceted text, extremely enriched with cultural signs. Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro “The Remains of the Day” can be regarded as one of the examples of typical British aristocratic prose. The narrator and protagonist of the novel is a butler, who serves in the large English Stately home Darlington Hall. The family estate is considered by the hero as a symbol of order and harmony, and at the same time it personifies the ideal world of the past that is gradually fading away. In 1993 the director James Ivory made a film based on the Ishiguro’s novel. He created different visual images of an English estate on the screen with particular accuracy. Fictional Darlington Hall is a combination of several Stately homes located in the southwest of England. The novel by Kazuo Ishiguro and the film by J. Ivory are memories of a bygone era of British Empire, ended with the Second World War.