The thesis focuses on ludic strategies of the English novel that make up its ludic paradigm in the last third of the XXth century. It is the first complex research of different ludic artistic techniques and devices (collage, allusion, irony, parody, reminiscence, metaphor, play with language resources) in Ukrainian literary study. The analysis of English novels by Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess, Malcolm Bradbury, William Golding, Ian McEwan, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, John Fowles is carried out on the narrative, thematic, intertextual, language and stylistic levels and gives an idea of priority directions of the novel's ludic tendency and its genre modifications in the mentioned period. The choice of literary works for the analysis created by English writers of classical form following and experimental longing in the 1960s - 1990s ensures the objective view on the ludic dynamics of the English novel in the last third of the XXth century and helps to determine its ludic paradigm.The author expresses the opinion that the nonselection principle characteristic for the postmodernist negation of the only possible way of events to happen combined with the conception of potential co-existence of different discources in one system has changed ludic techniques and devices into the initial principle of novel construction. Game-play embraces all structural levels of the text beginning with the language lexical play (individual author's neologisms, puns) to the play at the text level (parodying, style mixing, pastiche, quasihistorism, autocomments of characters and the author, visual metaphors) and intertextual play (allusion, paratextuality, reminiscence). It points out that refusal from the traditional mimesis manner of world's construction found its expression in creating a new alternative world and introducing a new marginal character. The author emphasizes that the irony in this case serves as the main artistic device of expressing character's attitude to the social hierarchy. The attention is drawn to the fact that British artists try to re-estimate the past from the modern viewpoint while creating their own literary worlds with historic simulacras. The researcher suggests that to reach the highest possible effect of revived past, the British artists refer to language stylization and literary means and devices. This approach to constructing past gives both the feeling of the world's reality and creation of the game space for the character and the reader. Visual metaphors particular for the novel in the 1960s - 1990s creates the additional game space. The analysis of paratextual structures (title, preface, epigraph, appendix etc) shows the writers' ability to connect intertextually different cultural worlds, create additional semantic meaning. The idea that the communicative aspect of game-play provides numerous reader's interpretations, that is novel's polysemantic reading is proved as well. The thesis demonstrates the English novel of the last third of the XXth century marked by postmodernist cultural and philosophical outlook doesn't break with the secular traditions borrowing from them the material for deconstruction.
