Tupakhina O. Victorian metanarrative in the turn of the XXI century fiction: destruction, deconstruction, reconstruction.

The dissertation highlights the complex and multilayered dialogue the turn of the XXI century literature is engaged into with historical, cultural, social, axiological, philosophical, epistemic and artistic encodings encompassed by the Victorian metanarrative. The Victorian metanarrative in all the variety of its constituents is reinterpreted in modern Victoriography through three basic representational modes (that of nostalgy, that of trauma and that of memory). Each of the modes, in its own turn, influences the thematical and interpretative spectrum of the derivative text, as well as its imagery, tropes, character sets, plotlines etc. The turn of the XXI century artistic consciousness applies three interpretative strategies to take over the Victorian metanarrative constituents: destruction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. The destructive readings tend to overtly neglect the ontological and epistemic foundations of Victorianism, thus scraping it out of historical context and turning it into a simulacrum free from any historical reference. In contrast, the deconstruction of Victorian metanarrative calls for revising and debunking the existing myths and stereotypes about Victorianism by explicating inner tensions and discrepancies in a seemingly monolithic ideological construct of Victorianism and transpositioning its fundamentals against modern contexts. Finally, the reconstructive readings tend to eliminate modern perspective upon the Victorian worldview, thus restoring its status as a metanarrative to the maximum extent permissible. The functional capacity of the model developed is tested upon 30 samples of modern fiction written at the turn of the XXI century and united at the macrolevel by a common reference to the Victorian age.