Travelogographic studies of recent decades allow us to reproduce the dual worldview of a traveler who finds himself immersed in a foreign and alien culture. A travelogue can tell us a lot about the culture that it describes, and about the one that shaped its author. Female travelogues of the 18^th century are of considerable interest in this regard, as British ladies of the period began to take long trips, discovered the exotic East, like Mary Wortley Montagu, or no less exotic Russia, like Elizabeth Justice, Elizabeth Dimsdale or Jane Rondeau. The Journal of a Lady of Quality by Janet Schaw stands in line with the general tradition of the British female travelogue of the 18^th century. This document, written in epistolary form and describing Miss Schaw’s journey to North Carolina, reveals several important aspects about the imagology of revolutionary America in British society. There is both the perception of America as a non-Western society, and the interpretation of its supposedly non-Western features in the context of the Enlightenment geographical determinism. There is also the reaction of a conservative-minded author to a society in a state of revolution. It is also interesting that Ms. Schaw retransmits the common clichés of British propaganda of her time, which allows us to judge the mechanisms and the degree of effectiveness of the pro-government media in the UK. Finally, The Journal of a Lady of Quality sheds light on the problems of identity within the British Empire of the 18^th century.

The notions of sorcery and witchcraft exist, in some way, in most human societies, and are often intrinsically connected with religion, or at least with the complex of ideas, concepts and practices usually referred to as folk religion. The specifics of folk religiosity in Southern colonies and later Southern states of the US, are under-researched in some aspects – while contemporary syncretic religions are explored in great detail, folk religion of the colonial period remains somewhat underexplored, mostly due to insufficient sources. However, it can be reconstructed, at least to some degree, using materials collected by members of local elites interested in local history and ethnography. This article examines the ideas of witchcraft in York County, South Carolina, in the 18th – 19th centuries. The key questions touch upon are the local specifics in comparison to wider colonial culture, the evolution of the ideas of witchcraft in the late colonial and early independence period, and the influence of folk religion on the emergence of specific southern religiosity.

The better part of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels where the author pictures different episodes of Otsego county’s (NY) life in the days of “frontier” can be estimated as a kind of “topological supertext”. He evokes images of American province at its birth with all its basic characteristics. Literary descriptions thus produce knowledge of a real object. He strives to define certain constants: geography, landscapes, human behavior, that can be interpreted as tokens of territorial identity. The issue of land ownership is one of the permanent items in all the novels. Cooper presents it as a matter of importance for the inhabitants of his native county, but the opposition of the legal owners that quite often are far from the estate and those who settle down and cultivate it in reality is one of the typical features of American movement to the Pacific up to the end of the 19^th century. J.F. Cooper also reveals semantics of the image and the idea of house that is crucially important in all the cultures, and especially for the newcomers. So, Land and House in Cooper’s “topological supertext” can be defined as archetypal loci vital for the chronicle of the American frontier history. All this was of great importance for the national self-identification.

The article discloses the importance of moral and ethical themes in “The Tunnel”, the philosophical novel by William Н. Gass. Despite the primary attention given to the formal elements of the text organization, the writer, at the same time, deliberately focuses on the problems of moral choice, finding the latter crucial for the continuation of human existence. Developing the story of the central character, a professor at the U.S. Midwestern university, who is finishing a long study on German fascism, the author reveals the danger of passing from ruminating about one’s own unsatisfactory life to rejection of the world at large and a desire to take revenge on it for one’s own failures. The novel grows into a significant study of the universal human situation, the “fascism of the heart” as a psychological factor that is formed long before fascism turns into a political phenomenon. The article reveals the writer’s conscious and intentional desire to discuss the topic of moral responsibility of a person in the situation of an individual choice, and demonstrates its consecutive realization throughout the narrative. Luring the readers into recognizable situations with the help of logical and convincing reasoning on the part of the main character, Gass seeks to warn them against rash actions, showing how easily civilized people could step over the invisible inner boundaries separating them from “monsters” if they allow their consciousness to accept facts uncritically and fail to resist the circumstances.

The African American literary tradition has always been characterized by the opposition between city and province, individual and community, which goes back to the collective consciousness of African Americans. In the work of the contemporary African-American writer Percival Everett, the American outback plays, if not a primary, then a significant role, since quite often the writer chooses small American towns and their surroundings as the setting for his novels. An example of such a work is the novel American Desert (2004). The narration starts in Los Angeles and then moves to the southern, underpopulated state New Mexico, which is famous for its desolate deserts and the absence of large cities. Addressing canonical topoi of African American literature, Everett contrasts two locations, depicting the peculiarities of the characters’ lifestyle, their customs and mores, their attitude to family values, religion, medicine, the state, etc. Life in the town is regulated by traditional standards of decency and its formal following, while the American province serves as a place for frightening and dangerous experiments. In addition, to create the image of the American province, the writer turns to popular stereotypes associated with New Mexico deserts and plays with them in a postmodern way.

In “John Henry Days” (2001), the well-known African American writer C. Whitehead addresses the phenomenon of a provincial town that, in an attempt to survive, uses the local legend of 19^th century African American laborer John Henry who took part in building the Big Bend Tunnel during the construction of the Chesapeake – Ohio railroad, defeated the steam drill in a contest (a human vs non-human vs Nature) and died immediately after. To commemorate John Henry, a number of ballads, songs, stories and other memorabilia have appeared since the event that took place in the early 1870s. Local authorities arrange a grand festival with a fair and other celebrations in the hope to improve the town’s budget. Not only numerous tourists come here, but also journalists, whose task is to “promote” the local phenomenon. The novel focuses on both the personality of John Henry and 20th century Americans who visit the small town of Talcott in order to reveal the atmosphere of the town as well as that of the backwaters of the USA. The book is a parody of both provincial customs and the press, which feeds off sensations, and consists of a series of vignettes depicting the multidimensional world of the American province. Among the major themes are racism which has taken disguised forms, junketeering as a phenomenon of the evolution of the media under the influence of new technologies, difference in the mentality of people living in big cities and small towns, family relationships, and responsibility of a person for his/her choices in life.

American Gothic is a complex cultural and literary phenomenon provided by the regional specificity of the USA. Two peculiar traditions of Gothic literature are placed under the “umbrella” of the term – the New England tradition, which is more focused on the immersion into the depths of the human psyche and carefully records various reflections of characters, and the Southern tradition, which owes its emergence to the heavy agonizing of Southerners on the death of the mythological beautiful South as a result of the Civil War. Due to the specific sociocultural life in the South, there were no large urban centers; the heart of the South is the outback, with its characteristic rootedness in the traditions of the past. The Southern outback is rather a topos, a generalized place of unfolding of meanings associated with the unique Southern experience of life, often a set of stable fable formulas, as well as common motifs, problems and plots. The article discusses some typical features of Southern Gothic poetics.

Describing the tragic decay of a once honoured and distinguished the Compsons’ family, posterity of the southern nobility, W. Faulkner states the idea that mainly a rejection of their ancestors’ notions of honour and dignity, religious and other human values, has led its members to the moral decay and degradation. And the masterful use of the modernist poetics’ achievements, i. e. a stream of consciousness, constant shifts of time, breaking the chronology of narration, demonstrating Time and Space as discrete objects as well as his superb art of montage, his impressionistic approach describing the grotesque heroes’ feelings, emotions and the luxuriant nature of the American South with its wealth of colours, sounds, odours, as well as the creation of symbolic images and leitmotifs – all this helps the author to reveal artistically the essence of the matter – the theme of the Compsons’ tragic decay and the incredible suffering of its members and their total loneliness. But a doomed to suffering Faulkner’s hero struggles to the end. The moral centre of narration in the novel is a black elderly servant Dilsey, brave and compassionate, capable of sacrifice, who is the personification of the traditional moral and religious values.

Until recently the mass-literature (pop-art) was not considered to be a serious factor of aesthetic development. In popular fiction Stephen King takes a special place. Speaking about the topical issues of modern society (the Presidential election in the “Dead Zone”, school bulling in “Carrie”, artificial intelligence in “Trucks”, etc.) he uses an entertaining intrigue and creates multi-layered characters. Both western and Russsian critics underline King’s ability to combine the ideological conceptuality and breath-taking plot of his stories.

The article discloses the fundamentals of aesthetics system of the writer, covered in the autobiographical notes “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”. The accent is given to his call for studying the art of story-telling, plot development, deep disclosing the nature of the character, inner truth etc., from the classics of world literature. Regarding the novel “Carrie”, one of the best example of King’s art, we notice that puritanical New England mentality didn’t lose its rigoristic frames in twentieth century. The main character of the story becomes the victim of her mother’s fanatism and the adolescent violence of her classmates. Depicting one of the middle schools of New England (Maine), King shows different forms of aggression, verbal humiliation, bullying. Cruelty and coarseness are moved to the communicative field. In the episodes with the violence to Carrie, the writer renders crowd psychology and so-called mental epidemic described by Carl Jung. Based on the M. Foucault’s assumption “blood is a reality in a symbolic sense” the article shows King’s addressing to ancient archetype and beliefs, connected with maturity of a girl. The special attention is given to the point-of-view device both in ideological and spacetime depicting of the reality. It is pointed out that the novel becomes the way of recognition of real dangers to morality and humanity.

Jane Smiley’s novel “A Thousand Acres” transplants Shakespear’s tragedy on the American soil rather accurately emphasizing the similarity of the names of the main characters to those of “King Lear”, and the analogous turns of the plot. This novel is a social novel as well continuing the tradition of the interpretation of the theme of land by Balzac, Zola, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Updike. The social message of the novel is stressed by the author in her tale of the land “floating from farmer to farmer”, of its expansion through crimes and meanness, of the destruction of nature which brings death into the families of the destructors. Jane Smiley develops a farm topos in the context of the social reality of the USA in the 70s and 80s of the 20^th century, depriving the farmer and his activities of any romantic coloring, exploring the social and moral consequences of land ownership. The themes of the moral impoverishment of the farmer who has achieved success through predatory use of land and the epistemological search of his daughters for their identity come to the fore in this novel. One of the main themes of the novel is the theme of ecofeminism.

Joyce Carol Oates’ short story “The lady with the pet dog” (1972) is a modern version of Chekhov’s masterpiece told from a woman’s point of view. The paper compares literary and geographic analogues of the two stories (the capital cities where the heroes live, – Moscow and New York, – the provincial towns where the heroines live, – the town of S. and an unnamed town in Ohio, – and the resort locations where their meeting takes place, Yalta and Nantucket Island), which leads to some findings about the role of the topoi in Russian-American intertextual dialogue. In particular, it is noted that in the contrast between the faceless province and the place of the protagonists’ fateful meeting, both in Chekhov’s story and in Oates’ story the distance from the sea versus the proximity to it is quite important. Another similarity of the stories is the long distance covered by the heroines on their way to the sea, which symbolizes the path of their internal transformation. The article also analyzes the feminization of Oates’ “Chekhov” story: the American woman author wrote hers in the third person, but from the heroine’s point of view, and to convey female psychology, constructed her narrative not chronologically, but cyclically and retrospectively. Thus Oates’s version emphasizes the spiritual rebirth of the heroine, not the hero.

Alternate history fiction traditionally attracts the attention of researchers and critics in the context of creating terminological interpretations and other naming options, considering the origins of the phenomenon and the process of formation of this subgenre of science fiction in world literature, identifying typologies and classifications, studying the commonality and differences in the construction of plots about specific eras in one and several literatures, as well as exploring the connection between alternate history and other literary genres. However, studying the specifics of localization of the narrative space of genre works seems to be an equally significant task for studying the characteristics of the genre. This article is devoted to the consideration of the image of the American remote places in alternate history works about the Second World War and its consequences. For analysis in the context of the given problems, two American literary texts created at different stages of the development of the genre were selected: a story “Two Dooms” by C.M. Kornbluth, which was published in 1958, and D. Quinn’s novel “After Dachau”, which was published in 2001. Particular attention in the article is paid to providing evidence-based examples of the significance of the remote places as a location actively involved in the construction of an alternate history narrative in both works under study.

The article analyzes the evidence of the stay in 1843 in the Far West of North America of the famous American naturalist, ornithologist and animal painter John James Audubon (1785–1851) on both sides of the Atlantic. The purpose of Audubon and his assistants’ difficult journey was to collect specimens of fauna and flora, tо draw sketches of animals for their further preparation of a work on mammals of the vast prairie region located on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Published in 1897, the journals about this trip to a remote frontier zone, are an interesting testimony of the era. However, they have not yet attracted the attention of domestic researchers. The journals describe nature, including such major rivers as the Missouri, Yellowstone and their numerous tributaries, as well as the daily life of Indians and still a few white trappers, inhabitants of fur trading posts, and military forts. The journals are an important source for using it in interdisciplinary studies of the history of the American Far West in the mid-1840s., where the wave of civilization of white settlers, primarily of Anglo-Saxon origin, has not yet reached in all its might. This wave was just beginning to gain strength, which later adversely affected the nature of the region and its indigenous inhabitants.

Views of “American progress” by the regional U.S. newspapers of the early 1850-s are analyzed in the article. The Library of Congress electronic database “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers” is used. As its materials reveal, some printed mass media, mostly Democratic, associated “American progress” with Manifest Destiny, with the territorial expansion of the United States, and with the attacks on the so-called “Old Fogies”. The theme of slavery in the North American republic was not raised in this context. Other periodicals, mainly Whig, spoke for “reasonable progress”, inner reforms. “The Anti-Slavery Bugle”, the abolitionist newspaper, which was published in Ohio, linked progress to the solution of the problem of “peculiar institution”, to the women right’s movement, to the intellectual achievements. On the whole, the materials of the electronic database show that at this period local papers were well informed about political discussions in Washington and New York. Estimates of “American progress” were affected to the great extent by party and political persuasions of the editors and authors, as well as by their attitude towards the debates about the role and place of youths in politics, in public life.

Western colonization played a huge role in the formation of the American state. The development of a border strip of vacant land in the interior of the country, called the “frontier”, had created a kind of socio-cultural environment, different from the habitable and civilized Northeast. A specific feature of the social evolution of the West was the attempt by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (briefly called Mormons) to create the theocratic state of Deseret in the second half of the 19^th century. In a vast territory, stretching from Western Colorado to the southern coast of California, they wanted to establish a socio-political order that combined the foundations of theocratic government with traditional Republican-democratic principles provided by the US Constitution. In practice this meant giving clerical and secular authorities to church elders who through the prism of religious beliefs influenced the way of their flock lives. And since citizenship in the newly formed state was granted exclusively to Mormons, there were their parishioners who massively elected to the institutions of state power. The Mormon’s faith, incompatible with the principal U.S. denominations, had long prevented its integration into American society. However, the Mormon spiritual heritage contributed to the maintenance of a stable myth among Americans about the possibility of alternative development of individual regions.

The paper is a comparative analysis of the American and Russian outback at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is based on the works of public figure and writer, landowner of the Tver province P.A. Dementiev. He emigrated to the United States in 1881, lived in different states and was well acquainted with outback of both countries. In his articles published under the pseudonym P.A. Tverskoi in Russian magazines, mainly in Vestnik Evropy, and books, Dementyev, as a former member of the zemstvo, paid special attention to the system of education and local self-government. He examined school education in the states of America and in Russia and came to disappointing conclusions about its state in his fatherland, where a law on compulsory primary education had not been adopted. Equally unfavorable is his view of the role of the zemstvo, which has limited powers. Based on American experience, Dementiev insisted on the need for reforms in these areas, as well as in others, primarily agrarian, proposing to free the peasantry from the oppression of all kinds of payments, which is the basis of the poverty of the province and the illiteracy of its population. The journalist explained the differences between the American and Russian outback by encouraging private initiative in America and its suppression in Russia, calling for the elimination of bureaucratic barriers to the development of “public initiative”.

The author analyzes the activities of the “copper kings” in Montana in order to illustrate the role of the American heartland in the industrial development of the United States at the turn of 20^th century. Being one of the most copper-rich regions of the country, Montana attracted the capital of entrepreneurs from New England and other industrial regions of the United States, which increased the share price of leading companies. The industrial development of the region provoked the exploration of new smelters, which led to a confrontation between the key owners of the companies for dominance in the region. The political nature of the struggle has significantly weakened the financial position of two key players – M. Daly and W. Clark. The share price of the companies M. Daly and W. Clark began to fall, which made the penetration of new players F. Heinz and J. Rockefeller simpler, and the confrontation became more violent. The press materials used, as well as the journalistic materials by muckraker T. Lawson helped to describe in more details the mechanism of financial speculation that was carried out, which led to the purchase by the companies of G. Rogers and J. Rockefeller of all the major copper assets of the state.

This paper examines the context of creation of the first full-length animated film by Walt Disney – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) – and suggests a hypothesis that the reason behind the success of Disney adaptations of European fairy tales may be found, among other things, in the typological similarity between the animation technology and the poetics of folk tales. Using Snow White as an example we will analyze the way in which color film, a flat and bright image, universally understandable and at the same time responding to the specific demands of the Great Depression era, became the reference fairy tale film adaptation and formed the basis of the American reinterpretation of European fairy tale material. The features of the European fairy tale highlighted by M. Lüthi (especially its one-dimensionality, depthlessness and abstract style) are considered in relation to their animated representation in Disney animated movies. The lack of surprise when characters meet magical creatures (even though magical episodes are carefully created in order to surprise the viewer – but not the hero), attention to the outside rather than the inside (i.e., representation of characters’ personal attitude and feelings through objects or easily understandable actions), as well as an emphasis on bright colors and clear silhouettes – all this determined the popularity of the animated versions of the fairy tales and ensured their “canonization” both in the context of the American fairy tale tradition and in the context of American cinema.

The article is focused on the dialogue with fairy tale tradition presented in The Princess and the Frog (2009), an animated film by Disney Company. The Frog Princess (2002), a book by Elizabeth Dowson Baker, an American female children’s writer, lies in the basis of the script. Baker’s work, in turn, is an interpretation of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale The Frog-King, or Iron Henry (1812). Besides the characteristics of the artistic interaction between the pretexts and cinematographic text and its features, appealing to The Princess and the Frog also allows us to bring out the specifics of significant modifications in Disney canon. The typical princess image transformation; the shift in emphasis from the expectation of Prince Charming in the role of a savior to the idea on the dream about career and independence come true; the depiction of French, Afro-American and “white” American cultures’ synthesis – all these enables us to define the material taken under study as the modern age product, acting as the visualization of certain fundamental changes in society and culture. In the analysis based on the principles of historical and literary and comparative research methods, we make a conclusion about the evolution of fairy tale tradition and archetypes with regard to contemporary heterogeneous reality, where addressing the classics functions as a peculiar platform for the implementation of relevant ideas.