Object: collection of novelles "In the Days", "The Legends of Old Kyiv", stories “Without roots. Biography of the Contemporary”; "Ancestor"; "Sleep of the Shadow"; "1313", "Quid est veritas?".
Subject: genre and style domimants of Natalena Koroleva’s prose.
Aim of research: to study genre and style features of Natalena Koroleva’s works which testify author’s skill in the process of creation genre forms in West Ukrainian prose discourse of the first half of the XXth century
Practical significance: conclusions and results of work can be used in the study of the history of Ukrainian literature of the twentieth century, primarily of West Ukrainian one, as well as for preparation of manuals or elective courses on the peculiarities of national writing, in particular autobiographical or historical prose, when writing scholarly works on history and theory of literature, reading lectures on the history of Ukrainian literature of the twentieth century. The materials of the dissertation will be useful for the teachers of language studies of educational institutions of different types.
Methods: biographical (for the description of the author's creative personality, elucidation of the fundamentals of her ideological and aesthetic system), comparative-historical (for comparing genre-style features of the artist's prose in the context of Ukrainian and world literature of the first half of the twentieth century), typological (for research the genealogical connections of the works of N. Koroleva with the genres of Ukrainian historical and autobiographical prose, the characteristics of structural coincidences and differences), as well as the hermeneutic approach (in the interpretation of the epic text) and receptive aesthetics (for determining the dominants of authors' thinking, which is the basis for the modeling of the receptive environment, the dialogue between the author and the reader, etc.).
In the dissertation the genre and style dominants of Natalena Koroleva’s works in the Ukrainian literature of the first half of the twentieth century are studied, in particular her novelles, stories, and novels which testify the author's skills in the process of modification of these genre forms. It is emphasized that the author's aesthetic thinking was perfected during the modernization of prose genres. Her experimental research in the novelles ("Legends of Old Kyiv", "In the Days") made it possible to trace the genre and intertextual connections with oral folk legend, apocryphal prose, spiritual context of Scripture, which clarified the style, formal, semantic, and structural parameters of N. Koroleva’s modernist novellete. It is proved that the stories "Without Roots. Biography of the Ctemporary "," Ancestor "," Dream of the Shadow" are original genre varieties, which are distinguished by historicism, autobiographical, advanced psychologism, polyphony, open chronotope, and complex narrative structure. The genre of the artistic and autobiographical story ("Without Roots. The Autobiography of the Contemporary"), a historical story with an autobiographical element ("Ancestor"), an artistic and historical story ("The Dream of the Shadow") are conditioned by N. Koroleva's modern novelistic thinking, genre-style synthesis, which contribute to a qualitatively new reception of the work. It was found that the modernist dominant of the novels "1313" and "Quid est veritas?" were artistic excellence through the synthesis of historical, adventure, mythological, socio-psychological novels, folklore legends, apocrypha, which determined their genre-style originality and Europeanized the traditional style and imagery of Ukrainian writing.
