Linguistic Features of British Postmodern Fantasy Discourse: Case Study of Neil Gaiman’s «Neverwhere»

Abstract

Being a significant segment of world’s literature, especially within certain genres, postmodern literature vividly reflects the characteristics of the national linguistic worldviews at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. Central to postmodernism is the linguistic and stylistic experimentation, the rejection of conventional narrative structures and an emphasis on fragmentation, the merging of fantasy with reality [1, Ch. 2]. These authors’ choices disrupt the reader’s expectations and create a fluid, disorienting narrative world that is especially visible in fantasy literature, where the boundaries of reality and fiction are constantly blurred. As postmodernism has emerged as a site of linguistic innovation, where language is deconstructed and reimagined, a thorough study of contemporary linguistic processes is incomplete without considering the postmodern literary context and highlighting its prominent linguostylistic features.