This thesis presents the first complex analysis of the prose by an outstanding contemporary Austrian writer Peter Handke, thus being a novelty both in Ukrainian and in foreign literary studies. The author of the research work seeks to define and to interpret major philosophical and aesthetic problems as well as poetics of Handke's prose of 60-80s. Therefore she retraces the development of the writer's literary system, pointing out some contradictions and coincidences between aesthetic principles described in his theoretical works and their textual fulfillment. In order to find out and to describe the poetological system of Handke's prose, the author analyses the Weltanschauung of the Austrian writer as well as general literary and aesthetic tendencies actual at that time, thereby integrating the elements of hermeneutics, structuralism and receptive aesthetics. The prose of the writer is shown against the background of literary process in the German-speaking countries of the given period, i.e. in the context of the "New Subjectivity" literature. Thus the thesis contains a precise examination of this literary trend not to be equaled in the Ukrainian literary criticism. The analysis of Peter Handke's prose text corpus of 60-80s through the prism of the New Subjectivity's postulates, philosophical problems and poetics allows to draw some important conclusions about P.Handke's literary evolution, its vector and specificity, which, in their turn, can be summarized in a periodic division of the writer's aesthetic and existential evolution. In view of this the author of this research work defines three major phases, namely: the phase of experimental search (60s): novels "The Hornets", "The Peddler"; the phase of "New Subjectivity" (70s): narratives "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" (1970), "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams" (1972), "Short Letter, Long Farewell" (1972) "A Moment of True Feeling" (1975), "The Left-Handed Woman" (1976); the phase of encounter with the Other (80s), that is, of search for the new aspects of cooperation between Self-subject and the world (people) around him: tetralogy "Slow Journey Home" consisting of three novels: "Slow Journey Home", (1979), "The Lesson of Sainte Victoire", (1980), "Children's Story", (1981), and a dramatic poem "Through the Villages", (1981).
