Article

Name: «Bilious men» and diatribe: the genealogy of the character and genre in Russian Literature

Authors: V. V. Maroshi

In the section Study of literature

Abstract: This article examines the origin of bile as somatic metaphor of the emotional state of character and of mode of satire in European and Russian literature. The bile in the artistic literature is not so much a «flesh» motif but a metaphor for emotional states of the hero, the narrator and the author. The interdependence of bodily and emotional aspects of the hero allows us to suggest the importance of «bile» for verbal behavior and physicality of the character in Russian literature of the early and mid XIX. Typologically it is close to the European character of «melancholy» and «spleen». In addition, in European and Russian literatures bile became the synecdochical designation of the entire satirical mode and entered, as the emotional tone, the set of diatribe genre units.

Keywords: satire, genre, diatribe, bile, temperament, bilious character

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