A. S. Byatt's The next room: domestic spaces, labour and its many ghosts

The article centers upon the poetics of the short story «The Next Room» written by Antonia Susan Byatt, a key figure in contemporary British Fiction. The title of the story immediately sends the readers to the space of the house, specifically to "the next room", where the voices of the protagonist's dead parents talk, and states the main theme of the story and several persisting motifs and images of the short story. The authors of the article investigate thoroughly the critical works of foreign and Russian literary theorists concerning the short story and the collection of stories «Sugar and Other Stories» (1987), into which «The Next Room» is included. The article investigates the motifs of the story that are mostly evident in it: motifs of life, labour, woman's identity, death, memories, family and different roots, of teeth, of family, of cacti. A lot of philosophical and literary works concerning the genre of the ghost story (to which this story belongs to) were analyzed to reveal the peculiarities of the genre in the fiction of the writer. The authors investigate domestic spaces and their limitations, image of the house of a family which is haunted by the ghosts of the dead, and identity of a woman in the domestic space and out of it. Critical and philosophical works on various adjacent topics helped the authors of the article to deepen the understanding of the story as well as to widen the "horizons " of its perception