The thesis (monograph) focuses on the comparative and functional research of the Ukrainian alternative history modern novel in comparison to English (American and British), German, Polish, Czech, Russian prose of alternative (alternate) history. Studies of modern Ukrainian and foreign prose reveal the genealogical originality and poetics, the artistic perspective of literary alternative studies as a meta-genre. The monograph outlines the theoretical basis, main provisions and conclusions of the dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philology.
The proposed monograph is intended for literary critics, philologists, culturologists, teachers of the humanities, graduate students, students and a wide range of readers interested in literature, history and cultural discourse, including alternative historical prose.
The ambivalence of AH meta-genre (being on the edge between fiction and historical prose) is that it differs from science fiction in a plot and is formed on the matrix genre of the historical novel in the same way as based on a fantastic view.
One of the most important factors in the definition of AH is that American literary studies regard alternative history as a subgenre of science fiction, although USA literary studies view its literature as the founder of this genealogical formation, while European studies consider AH as a meta-genre.
This is the reason why AH appears as a meta-genre in this study because the meta-genre is universal enough for comparative analysis of samples of various national literature. In world literature, if a peculiar formation obtains the status which subdivides into its fixing subgenres, we can call it metaformation in a global sense. This is an amazing story of the genre's formation and its transformation into a meta-genre. It produces active sub-genres in the context of creating new samples, and, meanwhile, this formation exists conditionally, is rarely named in literary or critical works, and is seldom indicated in the annotations to fictional works.
The reclassification of the genres of the modern novel, which actively developed in Ukrainian literature in the early 2000s and Western European literature leaves behind the Slavic discourse by 30-50 years, and it has been marked by changes in the structure of alternative history meta-genre. We see the process of the transition of stylistic forms and features of poetics into subgenres and genre units based on repeated and reproducible schemes. So, for instance, the political (according to its style characteristic) and detective novel (according to the genre one), merging with a journalistic genre, form a subgenre of the political novel of the AH in the intermedial space.
