Kumpan S. The novellistics by Evelyn Waugh: poetics of the comic

The thesis presents the comprehensive research on Evelyn Waugh's short stories of novella type. It is the first time in Ukrainian and foreign literary studies that the novellistics by Evelyn Waugh has been analyzed extensively in terms of poetics of the comic and its development throughout the writer's literary career. The novella genre features have been determined within the scope of Evelyn Waugh's short stories and those matching the novella model have been singled out. Taking into account the peculiarities of the author's narrative style, historical and cultural factors of English literary processes in 1930-60-ies, two periods in Evelyn Waugh's short story writing have been identified; the early period comprises sixteen novellas written in 1926-1936, and seven novellas of 1939-1963 belong to the late period. Evelyn Waugh's novellas have been proved to belong to a particular type of short stories in which the comic bears major role in forming the structure and influencing the content at all levels of the narrative. The ways of actualization of the comic of characters and the comic of situations and their roles in the creation of the comic picture of the world in novellistics of both periods have been considered on the basis of the latest theories of the comic. The analysis reveals the traditional and innovative features in the novellistics of Evelyn Waugh. The structural and semantic peculiarities of Evelyn Waugh's novellas, both early and late, have been proved to be determined by the comic as the main pathos of the narrative. The plot development pattern has been singled out alongside with the five-step narrative model with accumulation of the comic as the crucial feature both in early and late novellas by Evelyn Waugh. The poetics of the comic in both periods of the writer's literary career is based on the actualization of the characters' names with emphasized comic semantics, which works as an efficient way to strengthen the comic intention and esthetic content of the plot. The main concepts in the narration of early and late novellas have been identified. A set of stylistic resources to create the comic context and to convey the author's comic intention has been specified, including metaphors, comparisons and epithets, rhetorical questions and exclamations, lexical and syntactic redundancy, puns, oxymorons, lexical ambiguity, emphatic stress, and extensive use of intertextual references.