Image of Ireland in the Jennifer Johnston's creative works

Irish literature today is a cultural phenomenon that combines immersion into national issues and the depth of national self-reflection. A prominent representative of this literature is Jennifer Johnston, a novelist and playwright. Her creativity is referred to the so-called “Ulster novel” and is still perceived ambiguously in Ireland. In almost all of her works, the writer refers to the history of Ireland, which she sees as a destructive phenomenon in relation to the present. The article is aimed at the analysis of two novels by Johnston “How Many Miles to Babylon ?” (1974) and “The Old Jest” (1979) in terms of representing the image of Ireland. The presented work is based on the methods of gender and postcolonial studies, as well as cultural-historical and imagological methods. The relevance of the research is due to the unquenchable interest in Irish literature and the issue of national identity. The novelty of the article is determined by the fact that Jennifer Johnston’s works are practically unexplored in Russian literary criticism. Unlike many of her compatriots, the writer deliberately refuses to emphasize the political component. On the contrary, she concentrates her attention on nature, represented mainly through the image of water, and the “home” space. According to the author, these images are at the core of “true” Irishness. They are opposed to the external world, in a collision with which the heroes of both novels find themselves engaged in historical events, which involved violence either way. Violence in the novels is represented not only by the Anglo-Irish conflict, but also by the First World War (the novel “How Many Miles to Babylon?”). In addition, the writer ably uses the gender component to illustrate the ethnic identification of the characters. Thus, the Anglo-Irish identity of the heroes is duplicated through gender duality, and Ireland itself is deprived of its traditional unambiguous feminine essence.