Sea images in Jeanette Winterson's novel “Light housekeeping”

The article examines the poetological features of marine imagery in J. Winterson’s novel “Lighthousekeeping”. Spatialization is noted as the feature of the work’s poetics: the shift of emphasis from its temporal organization to its spatial one. Images of the sea, marine inhabitants, and a ship, preserving the memory of the meanings acquired in the history of literature and, being filled with new symbolic meanings, are included in the process of transgression. Together with intertextual inclusions, they form a kind of oneiric space, the typological feature of which is the synthesis of the real with the unreal. So the Turning Point, the seaside village of Salt and the maritime city of Bristol are described accurately in terms of topography and at the same symbolically in terms of its metaphorical meaning. Sea images (sea, shell, seahorse, ship) play an important role in the creation of artistic anthropology and anthropocosmology, symbolizing life, becoming synonymous with the fate of characters - their ideas about the world, memory (historical and existential), an artistically symbolical analogue of the consciousness comprehending the world. The whole structure of the novel’s artistic imagery is imbued with marine imagery. Intertextual re-creation in the text of Win-terson’s novel of the legend and the chivalric novel about Tristan and Isolde, which together with Wagner’s opera form a palimpsest allusion, is also connected with oneiric space and sea images. Despite the fact that the sea and sea images are not the object of direct representation in the novel, they contribute to the expansion of the meaning of the narrative, creation of the picture of the world, perform various poetological functions, participating in the formation of the character system, semantic space of the text and spatiopoetics of the novel.