Maxiutenko O. The problem of the author in Laurence Sterne's fiction.

The object is Laurence Sterne's novels. The aim is to reconstruct the author's creative beginnings in L. Sterne's novels in accordance with a variety of traditional research approaches that correlate the process of interpreting the writer's texts with contribution of his individual sense revealing mechanisms to it. The methods are historical and literary, sociocultural and hermeneutical; structural and narrative, semiotic approaches. The depth of Sterne's prophetic literary voice is generally ascribed to his being the forerunner of romanticism in the history of culture as well as his inborn talent of a writer who professed freedom and authenticity as the author-deity approaching and, yet, not identifying himself with the author-character in his fiction. Sterne also anticipated the poetics of "the crisis of the authorship" embodying his approach in the character of "the unreliable narrator" with the unstable evaluative text position attributing the imperfection of the novel to the beginner's lack of writing skills ("Tristram Shandy"). But to a far greater extent Sterne's significance is conditioned by his narrative device 'The Non Finito' focusing on the problem of literary communication, thus, making the reader reflectively aware of his text interpretation. Application sphere is the training courses.