Conflicts and paradoxes of the golden gleam of literary metaphors

The article addresses comprehending the paradoxes of English metaphorical structures in the “gold” conceptual matrix in the works of William Shakespeare and Johann Wolfgang Goethe. The emphasis is on the interweaving golden images of literature of the 16th and 19th centuries with the metaphors of modern English financial discourse. The analysis exploits stylistic means of the tragedy “Faustus: The Second Part” by Goethe and four plays by Shakespeare: “The Merchant of Venice”, “Timon of Athens”, “All is True” (Henry VIII), “Romeo and Juliet” in originals and translations. The characters of Goethe and Shakespeare are conveyed through the temptation of wealth, which allows, based on the hermeneutic method, to identify linguocultural similarities and distinguish the metaphorical projection of the authors's conceptual ideas. The relevance of the study is in the pursuit of enhancing the existing context of scientific literary research on the ambivalent symbolism of gold by a linguistic analysis of the lucrative metaphorics of the language tools in the characters' remarks. The article traces inter-textual connections with mythical narratives. The contours of the semantic content of golden metaphors are outlined. Parallels are drawn with other areas of artistic creativity - music, painting. Numerous examples illustrate how a network of metaphorical associations develops the principium of a conceptual conflict by transferring the concept to a foreign domain (wars, chases, medicine, physics). The findings of the study may be in demand in linguistics, cognitive science, cultural studies, and also in the comparative historical study of literature.