In the dissertation, the artistic and aesthetic paradigm of contemporary Ukrainian prose for children and youth is explored as a specific phenomenon. The legitimacy of comprehension of this scientific problem is motivated by the versatility of the research object – written by Ukrainian writers during the last decades and addressed to children and youth of prose works that form a qualitatively new and dynamic art and aesthetic phenomenon, organically linked with modern socio-cultural realities. Considering the subject, the purpose and tasks of the study, we offered the concept of the artistic and aesthetic paradigm, the methodology of its knowledge, based on the literary analysis of poetics in the synthesis of heuristic instruments of the narrative, recipe-aesthetic, gender, post-colonial and other approaches, multidisciplinary studies (Age Psychology and Pedagogy, Gender Psychology and Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, Sociology, etc.). The methodology platform was based on the theory of communication and the communicative theory whose heuristic potential was enriched with interdisciplinary interpretation strategy, postcolonial critique.
On the basis of the analysis of the artistic and aesthetic paradigm and key subparadigms, we defined general tendencies of the prose evolution for children of preschool and junior school age, teenage-youth audience: fullness of thematic and genre niches; artistic and aesthetic quality, updating the poetics of works, mastering the experience of foreign writers; the change in the functional aspects of the artistic text, that is the rejection of didacticism, ideological engagement, the orientation to the modern child, and adequate conversation with him/her. At the beginning of the XXI century, the ratio of realistic, realistic-fantastic and fantastic prose in its teenage-youth segment has changed, due to the dynamics of socio-cultural processes, the formation of new generations of readers. The breaking the taboo in contemporary Ukrainian prose for children and young people is one of its most characteristic features.
Through the prism of structural, historical-typological methods and taking into account positions of receptive poetics, the genre system of contemporary Ukrainian prose for children and youth is explored in the dissertation; a generalized classification of genres and specifies their specifics is proposed. The writers’ attraction to the original genre definitions, the tendency to combine works into cycles, and series are discovered. It is emphasized that one of the main tendencies that distinguishes the prose for children and youth from the context of general literature is centering the image of the child-hero. In the dissertation, for the first time, from the standpoint of naratology, receptive aesthetics and psychoanalytic studies, the specifics and patterns of creation of images of children-heroes in texts of different genres with specific narratives were revealed and analyzed.
