The dissertation researches the peculiarities of the artistic representation of childhood in Shakespeare's canon, which reflects the collective image of a child in the mental picture of the world of the English Renaissance and correlates with universal philosophical issues, contributing to the understanding of complex timeless issues. The study of Shakespeare's childhood discourse introduces a large number of interesting facts and literary observations into the scientific space, which express a vision of the specifics of the process of personal identity formation, which expands the research horizons of Shakespeare studies and stimulates interdisciplinary interaction.
The relevance of the dissertation is determined by a number of socio-cultural, historical-literary and methodological factors. The rapid growth of the anthropological vector of philological research in literary studies in recent decades calls for a reconstruction of the peculiarities of the reception of children and childhood in different eras. The Renaissance and its key figure V. Shakespeare offer extremely interesting material, the analysis of which contributes to a deeper understanding of the axiological dominants characteristic of this historical and cultural era, and opens the perspective of understanding the influence of anthropocentric humanistic ideas about the phenomenon of childhood on modern thinking, pedagogy and culture. The semantics and categorical status of the concept of "discourse of childhood in literature" need theoretical conceptualization, the implementation of which in the intellectual space of Shakespeare studies is acutely relevant in the context of the rapid growth of interest of foreign literary studies in the reception of childhood in the creative heritage of V. Shakespeare (A. Black, S. Greenhall, M. Eberle, D. Campana, T. Pendleton, K. Chejoy, R. Shaughnessy, etc.).
This dissertation is the first systematic study of childhood discourse in the works of William Shakespeare in modern Shakespeare studies, which determines its scientific novelty. The theoretical significance of the work lies in the categorical and terminological conceptualization of a number of concepts related to the theme of childhood, and the development and approval of an algorithm for the study of the discourse of childhood in Shakespeare's work, which can be used in the study of the specifics of the child's perception in other author's artistic paradigms and historical and cultural contexts.
The purpose of the work was to create a holistic panorama of the representation of the discourse of childhood in the multi-genre works of William Shakespeare, focusing on the correlation of universal and historically determined aspects in the author's reception of childhood as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Topos, themes, images, artistic tropes that represent children and childhood in the various genre works of V. Shakespeare became the subject of the research. The analysis of 1,500 text fragments, separated by a continuous selection from 154 sonnets, 2 poems and 39 dramatic works of various genres, allowed to obtain a multidimensional idea of the peculiarities of the reception of childhood in the Renaissance era and to reveal the peculiarities of Shakespeare's understanding of the phenomenon of childhood.
The theoretical and methodological basis of the work is formed by the corpus of literary, cultural and philosophical works devoted to the study of discourseology (T. Mikhed, I. Papusha, A. Prykhodko, G. Prykhodko, G. Khrabova, Y. Chernyak, I. Shevchenko, etc.). The conceptualization of the categorical and terminological apparatus of the dissertation research was carried out in the context of an interdisciplinary dialogue unfolding in the scientific space of the modern discourse of childhood, which includes philosophy (I. Holubovych, I. Kohn), psychology (R. Bain-Powell, E. Evans-Pritchard, I .Kravchenko, O. Krisman), psychohistory (R. Brown, L. Demoz, J. Piaget), cultural studies (M. Mead, N. Chomsky), ethnography and folkloristics (N. Aksyonova, N. Hrycyshina, N. Zhmud, I. Pavlenko), pedagogy (O. Zinchenko, R. Zozulyak-Sluchyk, T. Kochubey), literary studies (O. Bodugai, I. Bezrodnykh, K. Vasylyna, U. Hnidets, O. Gorbonos, L. Kolomiets, Ya. Kravchenko, D. Moskvitina) and others.
The choice of methods is determined by the purpose and tasks of the research. The use of general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis made it possible to create a systematic view of the state of study of the problem and to form a categorical and terminological apparatus and research tools. The sociocultural method was used to create a stereoscopic vision of a child in different historical and cultural eras (Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance)...
