Interpretación del concepto del amor en la novela "Teatro", de W. Somerset Maugham

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify and analyse the interpretations of the concept of “love” in Somerset Maugham’s novel “Theatre” through the prism of literary, philosophical, and linguistic analysis. The study is conducted on the basis of the printed edition of the novel from 1937 and its electronic version from 2001, presented on the Internet Archive platform. A detailed analysis of more than 100 text fragments is conducted, in which the concept of love is revealed in various forms, including romantic love, pragmatic relationships, love as manipulation and maternal affection. The analysis shows that the author conveys the concept of love through theatrical symbolism, reflecting the duality of human feelings. Frequency analysis demonstrates that the key lexemes associated with love occur more than 200 times in the text, with love being the most commonly used term. Lexico-semantic analysis reveals the dominance of emotionally intense expressions of love, including intense epithets, complex syntactic constructions, and theatrical metaphors. The conducted study deepens the understanding of the philosophical and literary aspects of the work and may be useful for researching the evolution of interpretations of love in English literature, analysing theatrical metaphors, and comparing national models of love in different cultures.

Keywords

artistic concept

theatrical metaphor

gender images

emotional expression

,philosophy of feelings

symbolism of relationships

literary discourse

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