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Abstract: The article deals with the problem of ambivalence of the addressee in the genre of English literary fairy tale. The practical research material encompasses original texts of fairy tales written by English authors over the period of the 20th–21st centuries. The relevance of this work is determined by the interest of the philological theory in the phenomenon of addressing the literary text as one of the most important categories of text generation, specifically manifested in the works originally belonging to children’s literature and still insufficiently investigated. This research paper fills a lacuna in the study of the addressed fiction text, especially in the context of the hybrid literary fairy tale genre. The aim of the undertaken research is to analyze the specificity of the genre in the aspect of its addressing, most clearly manifested in the narrative strategy of the author, who uses various linguistic and non-linguistic means outside the narrative space of the fairy tale text to imitate an oral story, typical of the nature of the fairy tale genre, and to establish direct contact with the reader. It is established that the specificity of the ambivalence of the reader's image in a literary fairy tale is due to the hybrid character of the structure and content of the author’s text, for which the use of various techniques of realization and maintenance of a live dialogue with the reader is an essential condition, leaving space for interpretation and refinement of meanings depending on the cultural experience and age of the addressee. Dialogue in a literary fairy tale has a creative character and is aimed at game-based communication with the reader, which can actively involve both children and adult addressee. The novelty of the research lies in the complex diachronic analysis of the narrative strategies that form the ambivalent image of the addressee in the English-language literary fairy tale of the 20th–21st centuries. For the first time, the logic of the transformation of these strategies and the image of the addressee during the key period of the genre evolution has been revealed on specific material, which allows the authors to speak not just about a static feature, but about a dynamic component of the poetics of the fairy tale.

About the author(s) :

Yulia A. Bashkatova

Kemerovo State University (Kemerovo, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1110-7204

Larisa P. Prokhorova

Kemerovo State University (Kemerovo, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2311-2385

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 12.02.2025; date of publication: 29.12.2025

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