ИСТИНА

The classic Gothic novel originated in English literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. H. Walpole, W/ Backford, A. Redcliffe, K. Reeve and other authors revived the Celtic and medieval mystics and paved the way for the development of new literature. In the 19th century, such first-class writers as Walter Scott, S.T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, Ch. Dickens, M. Shelley, O. Wild, and others actively used the techniques and poetics of the Gothic novel. In the 20th century, interest in Gothic was intensified in John Fowles’s and Iris Murdoch’s postmodern texts. As is known, Iris Murdoch spent part of her life among the gothic spiers of Oxford, the city of "magicians-intellectuals" and those who undergo initiation by the "Gnostic nightmare" (H. Blum). For research, we used the novels “The Black Prince” (1973), “ A Word Child ” (1975), “ The Sea, the Sea (1978)”. In these novels, the theme of the romantic villain is evidently present, and this character evolves from novel to novel, acquiring new features and characteristics, reflecting the pressing problems of the new world of the second half of the 20th century. Another important echo of Gothic is the system of leitmotifs perfectly developed in the novels under study, with which writers build up a reliable psychological context in which any, even incredible, events become authentic. This is an attempt to give an original through-reading of the three novels of the writer in a comparative structural-semantic perspective, proving the psychological and philosophical background underlying the very varied fabled upheavals of the novels. Cross-cutting motifs that unite the classic Gothic novel and its modern variations are as follows: the struggle of man with Rock and powerlessness before him, the motive of imprisonment, the motive of prophetic dreams, warnings, visions; the motive of escape and persecution, the motive of violence and unnatural passion, the motive of mysterious origin, the motive of Doppelganger, dualism and masquerade. Most of them are the most important plot-forming components in the new version of the Gothic novel of the second half and the end of the 20th century.