Devdiuk I. Existential Discourse in the Ukrainian and British Prose Works of the Interwar Period.

The monograph summarizes for the first time the typological features of the existential discourse in the Ukrainian and British literature of the interwar period in the European context. The homogeneity of the categories «existentialism» and «discourse» with common dominants of «interaction» and «action» has been proved. It motivated the appropriateness of their combination for describing individual artistic phenomena in the literature of different countries. The study systematizes the critical and literary reception of the interwar existential prose, traces the specifics of the artistic actualization of the phenomenon of existence at different stages of the development of Ukrainian and British literature. The diachronic analysis of the peculiarities of the literary existence proved the writers’ active appeal to the problems of human existence in the transitional periods of the cultural and historical development of mankind, marked by the phenomena of crisis. The prose of high modernism has been defined as a milestone in this process. It accumulated the tragic experience of the Ukrainian and British writers caused by the aftermath of the war, the revolution, and the dehumanization of the reality of the 1920s and 1930s on the whole. The most consistent signs of maturity have been traced in the psychological and intellectual literary prose which for the Ukrainian authors has become almost the only opportunity to express their own concerns, inspired by the disappointing realities of the totalitarian society.