Vasylieva N. Gender Interpretation of Nature: Colour, Sound, and Smell (based on Ukrainian, Russian, English, and French Belles-Lettres Prose of the Late XIX – the First Half of XX Century)

The thesis is devoted to investigating gender peculiarities and national features of the objective reality reproduction based on nature description fragments of Ukrainian, Russian, English, American, and French belles-lettres prose. Landscape contexts accumulate information about sensory experience of a person, being useful material that gives access to hidden cognitive mechanisms, nuances of worldview, and its verbalization by male and female writers, representatives of different cultures. For the first time, a complex analysis of colour, sound, and smell of nature elements/objects interpretation within one research based on the material of Slavic (Ukrainian and Russian), Germanic (English and American), and Romanic (French) cultures in a gender comparison has been made. Nature is viewed on the basis of sensory perception, in particular according to human sensorial channels: visual (colour differentiation), acoustic (sound distinction), and olfactory (smell perception). The illustrative material thorough analysis revealed gender and national similarities and differences in categorization and interpretation of the reality, namely objects and phenomena of nature.