The dissertation studies the genre peculiarities of fantasia/fantasy as a class of works in the English literature of the second half of the 19th the beginning of the 20th century. To this end, the approaches of Ukrainian and foreign literary theorists and critics to the definition and classification of fantasia/fantasy, the fantastic and speculative fiction are analysed. Taking into consideration the works of outstanding scholars, the author suggests her own definition of fantasia/fantasy as a class of literary works, finds ideological and aesthetic principles of the formation of fantasy genres, correlates the concepts of fantasy and the fantastic with the concept of artistic conventionality, and researches fantasia/fantasy as a literary phenomenon. At the same time, the dissertation uses the conclusions and positions of historical-literary and theoretical character, which have been implemented in papers of such famous researchers and theorists of the fantastic, as J.-P. Sartre, E. M. Forster, R. Caillois, T. Todorov, S. Lem V. Gopman, Yu. Kagarlitsky, E. Kovtun, T. Chernysheva and others. On their basis, the author fulfilled her own research of the place and role of unrealistic genres in the English literature of the second half of the 19th the beginning of the 20th century, and made her discoveries about the peculiarities of poetics of works and their interpretation based on the worldview and aesthetic position of the authors.
In accordance with the study of varieties of English-language “fantasia” of the second half of the XIX early XX century, the author defines that fiction works of this period are difficult to attribute to any one genre variety, they seem to be at the intersection of two or more main genres Gothic novel, literary tale, science fiction, and fantasy. In the analyzed texts, special attention is paid to poetics, through which we come to the deep levels of the text. The connection of English fantasia with mythology, folk tale, and Gothic novel, as well as the role of such techniques as grotesque and nonsense in it is revealed and highlighted. The author considers the categories of the wonderful and the frightful through the aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the ugly, the Nietzschean conception of the Apollonian and Dionysian principles, as well as through Freud’s notion of the uncanny.
