POETIC FEATURES OF 20TH–21ST CENTURY AMERICAN GOTHIC WORKS
Keywords:
American Gothic literature, poetic characteristics, Gothic poetics, symbolism, chronotope, unreliable narrator, grotesque, psychological horror, cosmic horror, Southern Gothic, racial trauma, feminist Gothic, intertextuality, Gothic atmosphere, artistic device system.Abstract
This article provides a systematic analysis of the poetic characteristics of American Gothic literary works of the 20th and 21st centuries. Employing comparative-typological, hermeneutic, and chronotopic methods of analysis, the study examines the artistic devices used by Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O‘Connor, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King, and Carmen Maria Machado. The article reveals the distinctive national features of American Gothic that fundamentally differentiate it from the European tradition, including racial trauma, Southern Gothic grotesque, psychological horror, and feminist Gothic. The research analyzes how poetic devices such as symbolism, allegory, unreliable narration, Gothic chronotope, atmosphere-building techniques, and intertextuality have acquired new meaning across different historical periods. The findings demonstrate that 21st-century American Gothic has become increasingly complex and multilayered, enriched by cross-genre synthesis, gender and racial identity concerns, and postmodern poetics. The scholarly novelty of this article lies in the fact that this subject is being comprehensively examined in the Uzbek language for the first time.
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