Wuthering Heights is one of the most significant realistic novels in British literature, primarily depicting the tragic love story of Catherine and Heathcliff. Nevertheless, involved in the love triangle, Edgar Linton receives much less attention from the researchers. In an attempt to further unravel the characteristics of Edgar Linton, this paper, in conjunction with Carl Jung’s archetypes theory, interprets Edgar’s psyche by analyzing his persona, anima, and shadow through qualitative analysis. The result shows a strong relevance of these three archetypes that are closely related to his childhood experiences. The joint influence of the archetypes forms typical features of his psyche that affects not only him but also his social networks and his soft personality is a good approach to alleviating the heaviness of this work and forming a sharp contrast with Catherine and Heathcliff.

American Writer Mark Twain in his works vividly records social changes caused by the industrialization in the 19th century. His writing could be regarded as a kind of construction of Americanism. He insists on advocating of Puritanism, using the American dialect to tell American stories, displaying the culture in American West and South. He employs humor and irony to combine American history with reality, getting rid of influences of the British literature to illustrate Americanism and the historical process of America.

The article is devoted to the poetics of the short story cycle - a genre of short narrative fiction, where classical traditions and experimental narrative techniques are used to explicate topical issues of contemporary British literature. Beside the fact that the stories are relatively short, they are characterized by semantic compression, gaps in meaning, “internal” psychological plot, intensity, expressive imagery, lyricism, implications. The consistency of the short story cycle is created by thematic complementarity, coherence of style and composition. The short story cycle by J. McGregor ‘That Isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone like You’ is devoted to everyday life of English Fenland inhabitants and can be attributed to the ‘narrative of community’ genre, traditional for British literature. McGregor’s short story cycle embodies almost all modern tendencies of the genre: a wide palette of themes within the framework of topical issues; vivid psychological portraits and images; variety of narrative types and forms; suggestiveness, implications, specific usage of pronouns, stylistic devices of contrast and repetition.

The intertwinement of poetic life writing and theological reflections has a long-standing history in British literature. This paper shows how two Victorian poets – Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. Abdullah Quilliam – use dialogic strategies to establish an autobiographic voice, which becomes an essential poetic means of the text. Through the representation of dialogic encounters, the poems establish an autobiographic mode of speaking, which is used to articulate individual conversion experiences and to negotiate conversion as an encounter with God. Based on the works of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, I will show how a dynamic understanding of text and conversion experience is essential to a reading that seeks to explore the poetic construction of Hopkins’s as well as Quilliam’s works. The representation of the dynamic encounter of the self and the Divine in the contact zone of the text provides a frame in which the authors locate themselves with regard to the religious majority of Victorian Britain. The texts link the spiritual journey of conversion to the self as being caught in the world, responding to God’s call as an answer to the world’s condition.