The Face in the Literature: Anthropomorphism vs Theriomorphism

Student: Barysheva Nataliia

Supervisor: Georg Wilhelm Heinrich Witte

Educational Programme: Philology (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2021

The topic of human self-determination remains relevant in our days. The study of such literary techniques as the anthropomorphism of the animal face and the theriomorphism of the human face demonstrates how attempts were made in literary texts to comprehend this problem through the rapprochement of man and animal. The paper provides a theoretical overview of the concepts of anthropomorphism and theriomorphism, and also considers situations with metamorphoses of people and animals, characteristic of literary texts. Scenes from the works of Russian (N. V. Gogol, A. P. Chekhov, M. Gorky, L. N. Tolstoy) and European (M. Cervantes, L. Carroll, V. Woolf) writers are analyzed as examples of anthropomorphic and theriomorphic portraits.

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