Emotive Situations in Pandemic Environment in Joe Hill’s Fireman

Abstract

The pandemic theme is popular in modern horror literature, Fireman (2016) by Joe Hill being an iconic example. The novel describes emotional situations associated with a pandemic caused by a deadly fungus. The article describes how the pandemic theme is linguistically represented in horror fiction. The material in question remained beyond the scope of scientific analysis, as did the topic of pandemic-induced emotions. The authors relied on the principles of linguistics of emotions, linguistics of text, cognitive linguistics, and concept studies. The linguistic methods of descriptive, typological, and logical-comparative analyses made it possible to identify the means and ways of representing pandemic-induced fear. The authors developed an algorithm for describing the linguistic means Joe Hill employed to convey the atmosphere of fear. A typology of emotive situations revealed the narrative features typical of the horror genre in general and Joe Hill’s style in particular. In his Fireman, Joe Hill avoided language units directly related to fear: he substituted them with words from the semantic field of burning and fire, which correlated with the symptoms of the disease.

Keywords

• pandemic
• emotive
• representation
• expressive means