The thesis is the first systematic study of London text of the English literature of the first decades of the twentieth century in Ukrainian Literary Studies. Correlation of the phenomenon of the city and the phenomenon of the text makes the textual study of the city in literature more productive, and gives way to identifying the nature of urbanism and its functions in the British fiction, as well as to disclosing the specific characteristics of London text in the works of its British representatives. It is shown that in the period of significant civilizational changes at the beginning of the twentieth century, the London text presented in the works of J. Galsworthy, B. Shaw, F. M. Ford, V. Woolf and other writers, accentuates the emergence of the phenomenon of a metropolis and contains the complex dynamic images of London as a spatial model of human life. It is also found that London creates its own intermedial space in which the literary and visual images complement each other, modifying the London text, thus updating the artistic language of English literature. New urban motifs, functions and basic poetical strategies, the subjec-tivization of the London chronotope, above all, have been analyzed within London text of the English literature of the period. It is elucidated that London text of English literature of the first decades of the twentieth century is integrated into various genre forms - poetry, prose and drama. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, London poetic text had been developing from the urban landscape lyrics (R. S. Bridges) and the impressionist anesthetization of urban landscape (O. Wilde) to modernist experiments with urban imagery and emphasis on hostility of a big city toward a person (T. S. Eliot) as well as loneliness of men who belonged to "the lost generation" ("the Trench poets", V. H. Auden). London creates a dramatic text, most vividly represented in the works of B. Shaw. In his playwriting metonymical images of London actualize current socio-cultural problematics, first of all, social issues. Taking into account that London is a key motif of the early 20th century London prose text, the relationship of modernism and a new phenomenon of the metropolis is emphasized. In the modernist prose the city is presented through individual consciousness. The narrative techniques of fragmentation and temporal distortions allow fixing the living character of the great city, moments of human life in its inconsistency and spontaneous manifestations, specificity of its communicative space and original atmosphere. Thus, London text of the English literature of the first decades of the twentieth century creates a monumental spatial image of London in which a recorded cultural memory of that generation is combined with a perspective of filling and proliferating, being aimed at the future.
