Religious Fabula as a Means of Increasing the Mass Readership
Rezumat
Abstract: The purpose of the study is to analyze how religious fabula is utilized in contemporary mass literature and find a link between the use of religious fabula and the commercial success of a literary work. The methodological framework of the study consists of conceptual provisions from different fields of science, such as history, the theory of literature, literary stylistics, and aesthetics. The study reveals that today’s fiction writers employ a variety of strategies for exploiting religion in their works, among which creating a quasi-biblical chronotope; decoding religious symbols and scandalous pseudepigraphon, and retelling religious stories with postmodern twists. These solutions, seen in both Russian and non-Russian fiction, are to shift from mass/low literature to middle literature, attract more readers, and achieve commercial success. The results of this study may be useful in teaching literary disciplines in investigating the field of mass literature.
Keywords: mass literature, religious fabula, quasi-biblical chronotope, pseudepigraphon, literary reinvention.
Citation suggestion: Tsvetkova, Milena, Evreeva, Olga, Saenko, Natalya, Maltseva, Svetlana. “Religious Fabula as a Means of Increasing the Mass Readership”. Transilvania, no. 5 (2021): 38-45.
https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2021.05.04.
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