Fiction representing sociocultural metaphor of the north and south of England (based on the speech characteristics of the characters featured by H. Mantel, S. Dunant, and R. Galbraith)

The work is aimed at studying fictional representation of the sociocultural metaphor of the North and South of England by analyzing speech characteristics of literary characters with the northern or southern type of pronunciation. The material of study is comprised by H. Mantel’s story “Learning to Talk”, S. Dunant’s novel “Under my Skin”, and R. Galbraith’s novels “The Silkworm”, “Career of Evil”, and “Lethal White”. The purpose of the article is to describe the evolution of the North and South sociocultural metaphor. The analysis has revealed that English identity representation in the texts of contemporary writers varies from the distinctly pronounced opposition North - South associating the North with low standards of life, poor education and culture, and the South - with plenitude and aristocratic manners, to the more profound and sympathetic perception of the Northern metaphor. Thus, in R. Galbraith‘s novels the North represents the backbone of English identity, the authentic character of regular people who maintain real values and such truly English traits of character as humor, common sense and readiness to help in the epoch of total hypocrisy and opportunism. In “Lethal white” (2018) the metaphor of eternal opposition North - South is personified and represented by two sides of the main character’s language personality, each of them having its own name, character and profession. Their conflict in the novel is resolved by way of replacing antagonistic perception of each other by the North and the South with the idea of their collaboration or situational leadership. The culture-modelling images of thriving metropolis and degrading province become history, giving way to the new concept of cultural polyphony where each accent is valued both for uniqueness and for its contribution in the common palette of English identity. The research is of interdisciplinary character, as its findings are of interest from the perspectives of conceptual metaphor theory, sociolinguistics, fiction analysis, applied phonetics, and linguoculturology.