Typology and strategies of creative reception: a case study of English postmodernist poetry and prose

The paper focuses on complex research and description of creative reception theory and typology. There are provided definitions of such terms as reception, creative reception, creative reception strategies, and others. The author builds the typology of creative reception on the basis of works by E. V. Abramovskikh, S. Ye. Trunin, M. V. Zagidullina, V. I. Tyupa, and M. Naumann. This typology includes two types (or levels) of creative reception, defined as classic and postmodernist. Each of the types is characterized by a number of strategies, i. e. ways of representing an artistically received text in one’s own work. The classic type strategies (formal, authentic, neutral and antithetical) focus primarily on plot transformation. As for the postmodernist level, the author singles out two strategies: congenial and play. The theory and typology of creative reception is substantiated with some examples of reminiscences and allusions to English and world poetry. The examples under analysis are taken from the following prose works by the outstanding English postmodernist writer John Robert Fowles (1926-2005): the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), the collection of long short stories The Ebony Tower (1974), the philosophic book The Aristos (1964), and also the lyric collection Selected Poems, published posthumously in 2012. The collection has not been translated into Russian yet. Therefore, the poem under analysis (Islanders) has been translated into Russian by the author of the present paper. The paper also deals with indirect Biblical reception which is found in the allusion to the ivory tower. The allusion gave the title The Ebony Tower both to Fowles’ long short story and collection as a whole. The author of the paper draws a conclusion about the dominant creative reception strategies in the literary works under analysis and also about the possible use of the presented creative reception typology in analyzing works by other writers.