“I See With the Eyes of Stone”: the Phenomenon of the “Archeological Imagination” as a Characteristic Feature of the Fantastic Literature of the Late 19th – 20th Centuries (R. Jeff eries, K. Grahame, W. Maine)

The article will discuss an intercultural phenomenon introduced into scientifi c discourse by European scientists in the early 1990s and known as “archaeological imagination”; it is a situation when, through contact with some artifact of the past (whether man-made or natural), a person experiences a special, sacred or even epiphanic experience, and, remaining physically in the present, makes a kind of journey into the past and sees with his own eyes pictures of bygone times. This phenomenon, which attracts the interest of researchers from a wide variety of fi elds of science, can be traced in modern science fi ction literature and is an eff ective mechanism for creating fantastic collisions. Since the second half of the 2010s, this approach has been successfully used by literary historians, including in the analysis of works of fantasy orientation (time-slip fantasy literature, science fi ction, etc.). Our task is to examine its genesis to identify the factors that infl uenced its emergence in the second half of the 19th century, both social and cultural, and to trace how the ideas outlined by Victorian writers (R. Jeff eries, K. Grahame) were developed in the fantastic works of the 20th century (using the example of the work of the W. Maine, author of novels for children). Along the way, we will pay attention to what phenomena and processes – historical, cultural, etc. – infl uenced the development of this unique poetics, which continues to exist in modern science fi ction literature.