Huliak T. Modifications of the Female Detective Novel in the Works by Dorothy Sayers and Irene Rozdobudko.

The thesis is devoted to the analysis of the detective novels by Dorothy Sayers and Irene Rozdobudko. It is carried out on the basis of the comparative and typological method that is indicated to be the main in the research. The analyzed works of the writers are considered to be vivid examples of the detective literature in its time and marked by the peculiarities of the social conditions and national literature tradition of each of the authors. Since this scientific research lies in the field of the comparative genology, the boundaries of the concepts of «detective novel» as an invariant of an artistic work and «female detective novel» as its variant are outlined. The original features of the classical detective novel which constitute the invariant model of the detective genre include the following: significant amount of pages; canonicality; investigation of the riddle in the centre of the plot; intrigue; a combination of the incredible and the plausible; closure and conditionality of the chronotope; special structure of the image of the protagonist. Studying a female detective it was discovered that it began to form as an independent genre at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries with the emergence of feminist studies. In the female detective prose of this period there is a shift in the emphasis on the area of sensory and its role in the plot collisions of the work, as well as on non-literary factors, in particular, the environment and education of the writer, her interests, knowledge and experience. It is determined that the flowering of the female detective novel in the English-speaking world coincides with the epoch of emancipation when women began to actively fight for the possibility of career growth in various spheres of the human activity. One of the brightest representatives of this movement was the Oxford graduator Dorothy Sayers, whose activities as a writer and literary critic became a milestone in the history of the genre. The study identifies the characteristic features of the author’s style which consist in the development of the system of images, the usage of the exquisite literary language and the depiction of scenes with the body detection and actual killing, describing which the British detective writer was ahead of her time. In addition, the writer touching the problems of high and low genres in her critical works, combines elements of high and low styles in the artistic practice. According to the thought of Dorothy Sayers, set forth in the work «A Critical and Biographical Study (unfinished)», in any work there must co-exist three principles: the father is a creative idea which is the beginning of the process of creation; the son presents its images, language, style and development of action, that is the material content of the idea; the spirit is those feelings that the author invests in the work, writing it, and the reader experiences in the process of reading. The triuneism mentioned in the detective novels of the English writer raises the so-called «entertaining» or «mass» literature to «serious» or «elitist».