The transformation of gothic poetics in a graphic novel adaptation (based on the graphic novel by Amy Chu and Soo Lee “Carmilla. The first vampire”)

Statement of the problem. Despite the rapid growth in popularity of literary ‘retellings’, or ‘rewrites’, and, in particular, graphic novel adaptations, academic literary criticism has not yet developed a unified terminology or methodological approach to their research. The purpose of the article is to offer analytical reading of the graphic novel by A. Chu and S. Lee “Carmilla. The first vampire”, and on this material to identify strategies for adapting such constants of Gothic poetics as the image of the Gothic heroine and the Gothic chronotope, as well as to describe some mechanisms of transmedial transfer that allow transcoding the text into a hybrid verbal-visual narrative. Methodology. The article employs a comprehensive methodological approach, which synthesizes elements of structural criticism and the rhetorical-axiological method. The results of the research. As a result of the analysis of Chu and Lee’s graphic novel “Carmilla. The First Vampire” in comparison with the precedent novel by J.Sh. Le Fanu “Carmilla”, it has been revealed that the authors implemented significant changes to the structural elements of the gothic narrative, completely changing the profile of the main character by amalgamating the functional roles of the Gothic heroine and the Gothic hero, as well as offering a new chronotope of the New York Chinatown as a mystical space that meets the Gothic principle of otherness. Some hidden references by the authors to their native Chinese culture, which organically complemented the adapted version of the plot, were also analyzed.