The research conducts a comprehensive polycritical study of the London text of
English Renaissance literature, which was formed as a coherent complex construct in
the late Renaissance and became one of the fundamental cultural codes through which
the national identity of the English was built. During the reign of Elizabeth
Tudor (1558-1603) and the first decade of James Stuart’s reign (1603-1625) London
appeared in literary works not only as the geographical and political center of the
country, but also as a sacred and mythologized space in which historical narratives,
biblical allusions, and contemporary sociocultural ideas significant for the nation's selfidentity coexisted. Due to this, the London text performed an integrative function: it
connected the local and the universal, the real and the symbolic, the past and the
present.
The relevance of the research is determined by a number of sociocultural,
historical, and methodological factors. The term «text of the city» was introduced into
scientific circulation by representatives of semiotics, and is now actively used in
Ukrainian literary studies. It is used in the studied by S. Andrusiv, K. Boriskina,
G. Grabovych, T. Gundorova, V. Dmytrenko, O. Kyrychok, Y. Kryukova (Klimchuk),
M. Laiuk, V. Levytskyi, L. Oliander, O. Saliy, O. Kharlan, and others. The text of the
city functions a hypertext that is formed in the minds of recipients through interaction
with fictional and non-fictional works and, over time, becomes embedded in the
collective cultural memory.
Interdisciplinary approaches that integrate philology, history, sociology, cultural
studies, and urban studies are becoming increasingly popular in the methodology of
researching the text of the city. The London text is examined through a sociocultural
perspective (K. Beckson, R. Williams, J. White), in the context of multiculturalism and
imagology (P. Rau), and in the urbanistic and geopoetic aspect (J. Finch, J. Gurr,
E. Tso).
Within the framework of this research the London text of English Renaissance
literature is interpreted as a text of the city through the prism of polycriticism for the
first time in world literary studies, which determines its scientific novelty. The study
fills the gaps in the theoretical and methodological basis for studying urban texts. It
develops and tests an analytical algorithm consisting of four stages. The first stage,
based on V. Toporov's theory, involves analyzing a corpus of English Renaissance texts
to identify the material and natural features of the London text and its phenomena of the
spiritual and cultural sphere. The second stage is aimed at literary research of those
conceptual features of the Renaissance London text that form a relatively stable system
of semantic constants. The third stage reveals the metaphorical layer of the London text
in the works of Renaissance authors and reveals its semantic, symbolic, and semiotic
implications. The fourth stage clarifies the specifics of the London text functioning as a
strategy for implementing the principle «literature is culture in action», which includes
an analysis of dominant ideologemes and symbols, the identification and decoding of
political implications, the interpretation of religious contexts and religiously marked
images in the London text.
In addition, the dissertation introduces fragments of neglected Renaissance
chronicles, pamphlets, and novels into the research space of Ukrainian literary studies,
thereby broadening the general understanding of English Renaissance literature. The
author has for the first time analyzed the specifics of the reception and representation of
the concept «city» in general and «London» in particular by Renaissance authors. The
research also outlined the significance of geographical locations in literary texts, and
traced the process of formation of the generalized image of London in the collective
consciousness of its citizens.
The theoretical significance of the dissertation lies in the development and
justification of methodological tools that combine general scientific approaches with a
specific method (analysis of the text of the city), which resulted in the ability to
comprehensively trace the peculiarities of the structuring of the London text in English
Renaissance literature. The research also formulates the author's definition of the term
«text of the city» and proposes an algorithm for its interpretation in literary works of the
Elizabethan era, which expands the possibilities of modern literary methodology.
The aim of the research was to determine the features of the structuring and
functioning of the London text in English Renaissance literature as a holistic
multidimensional unit.
