Literary and cultural dialogue in Eliza Haywood's novel “Fantomina”

The article is devoted to the study of the dialogue of carnival and masquerade cultures, as well as different literary traditions in E. Haywood’s novel “Fantomina”. This dialogue is realized through the writer’s appeal to the imagery of commedia dell’arte, the plays and poems of her contemporaries and predecessors (Congreve, Johnson, Shirley, Waller), as well as the word game - all the names of the heroine are “talking”, and behind each lies the image of a charming commedia picara, Columbine. The detection and understanding of carnival imagery in the work is the key to revealing the identity of the main character, and, in combination with the analysis of the biography of the writer, allows to answer a number of “burning” questions among researchers of Haywood’s work, namely: what is the true face of the heroine; how much the ending of the novel, in which Fantomina ends up in a monastery, corresponds to the logic of character; can Fantomina be considered the first example of a proto-feminist work. The identification of the allusions present in the text of the novel gives scope for new readings of the plot: the story of the main character is both a metaphor for Eliza Haywood’s struggle for a place in the sun in the literary world of the 18th century, and the participation of the writer in the global debate of her contemporaries about the bad influence of certain literary genres on the minds of young people, and the myth of the eternal femininity, which is in a state of endless change and controls its own development, and the drama of a woman torn between the need for free self-expression and the desire to be loved and accepted.