Tulup E. Heroic motives in the Scottish poetry of Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The thesis is the first attempt in the Ukrainian literary criticism to research the motive dynamics of the HEROIC concept as represented in the medieval Scottish poetic discourse. The analysis embraces three periods: the early Middle Ages (6th - 12th cc.), the high Middle Ages (13th - 14th cc.) and the late Middle Ages (the end of the 14th and, partly, the beginning of the 16th cc.), with a main accent upon the High Medieval period. The periodization has been determined by the key events of the Scottish Middle Ages, of religious, social, ethnic and cultural character. The paper proposes a systematic revision of the factors stimulating the Scottish "heroic" concept originality, conditioning also its specific poetical realizations. The author pays her special attention to the correlation between genre and motive preferences typical of the 3 periods under examination. Also, a biographical and literary outline of poets and their works, most influential for each period, is given. The thesis sums up with an evolutionary model of Scottish medieval heroic motives, their invariant and variant constituents.