RACE, MEMORY AND SILENCE IN THE GENRE OF FAMILY CHRONICLE: GEORGE W. CABLE'S THE GRANDISSIMES AS A CHRONICLE OF DISINTEGRATION

The article analyzes George W. Cable's novel The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) within the context of the family
chronicle genre. The relevance of the study stems from the need to reconsider traditional genre models of the family chronicle in
light of multicultural and postcolonial literary practices in nineteenth-century American literature. The methodology combines
comparative-historical, postcolonial, and narratological approaches together with elements of genre theory. The article examines
the three-generation structure of the Grandissime family, the mechanism of racial stratification within a single lineage, the function
of silence and omission as structure-forming narrative devices, and the allegorical correlation between family history and the history
of the American nation during Reconstruction. It is established that Cable creates a fundamentally new type of family chronicle -
a chronicle of disintegration - in which generational continuity is replaced by rupture and memory by forgetting. The scholarly
novelty of the study lies in interpreting the novel as a new type of chronicle, intuitively created outside canonical genre patterns.
The practical significance of the research lies in the possibility of using its findings in developing university courses on the history
of nineteenth-century American literature and the theory of literary genres