Visych O. Metadrama: Theory and Representation in Ukrainian Literature.

For the first time in Ukrainian Literary Studies, the thesis presents the complex analysis of metadrama as a genre phenomenon, which is characterized by reflexivity and complication of the hierarchy of dramatic reality. The thesis studies out the range of the implementation of the metadrama poetics in the Ukrainian drama of the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. The dissertation proves that metadrama is one of the forms of artistic super-constructions, which testify to the complications of artistic thinking caused by the processes that accompany identification and self-identification prospection in art. During the last decades, the humanities intensively capture the branching of a multi-level network of self-reflection in literary work, attraction to diverse virtual visions, hesitance in reality and escaping from it. The trajectory of the Ukrainian metadrama development in the twentieth century dates back to the literary heritage of Mykhailo Starytskyi and Ivan Karpenko-Karyi who actively used the topos of a theatre, the techniques ‘play within a play’, literary and life references, and self-references and created the first samples of a metacharacter. The climax of the metadramatic experiments in the Ukrainian literature of the twentieth century is the works of the emigrant writers Ihor Kostetskyi, Yurii Kosach, Liudmyla Kovalenko, Ilarion Cholhan, and others.