Discourse of Wold War 1 in Joseph Roth’s novel «The Emperor’s Tomb»

Abstract

Aim. The aim of the article is to analyse J. Roth’s reflections on the experienced historical event and the type of its literary aesthetization in his late novel «The Emperor’s Tomb».

Methods. This investigation is based on a complex approach, which includes а combination of the culture-historical method and principles of new historicism, including biographical analyze.

Results. The features of I World War’s presentation in Roth’s writing manner are described. The attempts to explain the cause-and-effect relations of these features and of the author’s intention are developed. The autobiographical elements and the context of actual events in the time of the novel’s appearing are considered.

Scientific novelty. The Great War belongs to the most important motives of J. Roth’s work, though the researchers of his prose didn’t pay particular attention to it, examining it mostly as a context of Austrian-Hungarian’s collapse, loss of the writer’s fatherland. The topic of the Great War, the same as military discourse in Roth’s prose is not researched separately yet, in combination with correlation to real historical facts – this is been investigated in the article, this determines it’s actuality.

Pactical significance. The material of this article can be used for the further study of J. Roth’s work, discourse of World War I in the literature and the Austrian literary process of the first half of 20th century. The scope of this article doesn’t allow to consider the discourse of the World War I in late J.Roth’s novels properly. So, in this article are showed and described only its main issues on the example of «The Emperor’s Tomb».