Emotions of Mystery in Gothic Novels and Thrillers

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the study of the emotions of mystery in Gothic novels and thrillers. For many years, beginning with ancient times and up to modernity, mysteries and secrets were under thorough investigation by scientists. Mysteries, secrets and silence are associated with horror and happiness. That’s why they became the object of the proposed article. According to the linguacultural approach, the concepts were studied as complex phenomena, with composite meaning peculiar to the concepts under analysis. The concepts MYSTERY, SILENCE and SECRET, were considered as the typical situations, the structure of which consists of such spheres: actants, predicates, attributes, quantifiers, space and time. Each of these spheres represents part of the characteristics and makes it possible to create a general understanding of the concepts under analysis as of complex phenomena, which are most vividly revealed in Gothic novels and thrillers. These novels disclose the emotions of mystery as unknown, horrific and tense situations are the main feature of these genres. Mystery has the key role here and is the inseparable part of their understanding. It was demonstrated that the concepts under analysis represent positive and negative features which denote their ambiguous and binary character at the same time.