AMERICAN LITERATURE

The article deals with the origins of specific features of the US mass fiction - increased didacticism and broad reliance on the traditions of national literature. In the usage of Russian American studies new facts are introduced (popular novel by JR Ridge "The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the famous Californian bandit" (1854), etc.). Fiction of North America, initially oriented to the widest and most democratic audience, since the XVII century. worked out original techniques and principles of the most effective impact on the reader.

The paper considers the bipolar racial model representing African Americans in tragic and / or comic modality in American literature and culture (18th – the beginning of the 20th century). This model was formed in the 18th – beginning 19th century, continued to exist in American abolitionist writings, minstrelsy and plantation novel during the 19th century; having been absorbed by the Black American literary tradition, it underwent a considerable change especially in the Harlem Renaissance period.

F. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) exerted a considerable influence on American literature since 1940s. The works by outstanding authors beginning with Saul Bellow (Dangling Man, 1944) or Jerome Salinger’s prose and up to Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991), Percy Walker, David Foster Wallace, show a persistent fascination of American writers with the novella and are based on re-reading and re-interpreting Dostoevsky’s ideas, motives and imagery.

The article deals with the images of eccentric characters in the short stories “Jerry and Molly and Sam” (1972), “Fat” (1971), “They Are Not Your Husband” (1973), “Neighbors” (1971), “The Idea” (1972) written by an outstanding American writer of the second half of the 20th century R. Carver.