Literary Space Research Articles

LING UISTIC MEANS OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION IN TRANSCULTURAL PROSE OF FINLAND (PART 1)

The article discusses the features of transcultural writing on the material of the work by Ranja El-Ramly The Position of the Sun(2002). The work is written in Finnish, which, along with Arabic, is native to the writer, since El-Ramly comes from a bicultural family. The purpose of the study is to describe alliteration as a means of artistic expression. The methodological basis of the article is a transnational approach to cultural phenomena, which pays attention to movements and sociocultural existence beyond national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries in literary life. The main research method is the method of linguistic description of specific linguistic facts.The article reveals the content of the term ‘transcultural literature’ and its place in the literary space of Finland. The genre of the work The Position of the Suncan be defined as a lyrical novel, which is relatively new for Finnish literature. The work represents the flow of impressions that make up the content of the narrator’s image.The author of the article concludes that the special sound organization of words in a sentence, for example, the repetition of identical vowel sounds at the level of a phrase and even a sentence, is aimed at the emotional transmission of the mental world of the character

:Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities

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Multiculturalism in Teju Cole's Novel "Open City"

The object of the study is the modern American multicultural prose of the late XX-early XXI century, the subject of the study is the situation of multiculturalism. The research material is the novel "Open City" by the modern American writer of Nigerian origin Teju Cole, published in 2012. The purpose of the study is the relevance of this study due to several factors. Firstly, at this stage, both in foreign and domestic literary studies, one can observe a continuing interest in highlighting various features of multicultural literature in the United States. Secondly, today T. Cole is a significant author in the modern literary space of the USA. The novel we are analyzing is distinguished by its appeal to the iconic trends of modern US literature and is an interesting material for research in the context of the designated topic. If the work of many representatives of the multicultural prose of the USA of the late XX-early XXI century became the subject of scientific research, the work of Teju Cole is practically not studied. In this regard, the novelty of our research lies in the fact that for the first time in Russian literary studies, an analysis of the novel "Open City" is provided from the point of view of the functioning of various cultures and their influence on the formation of the identity of the protagonist. As a result of the research, we come to the conclusion that the novel highlights the multicultural situation in which the main character finds himself. Such a situation causes a mental crisis in the mind of the hero, since he cannot fully feel his belonging to any of the cultural components.

Working through maternal ambivalence: the wake-up call of Chanson douce

ABSTRACT This article examines Leïla Slimani’s 2016 international bestseller Chanson douce through the prism of the work’s portrayal of maternal ambivalence. Such ambivalence is analyzed in relation to the two working mothers represented in the text, Myriam and the nanny Louise, and contextualized within socio-historical, literary and psychoanalytical parameters. The article draws on a wide range of theoretical and ‘applied’ readings of maternal ambivalence, ranging from the writings of Simone de Beauvoir to Rozsika Parker, to suggest that the institution of motherhood continues to be a protected, idolized space that, as Adrienne Rich maintained almost forty years ago, has little in common with the actual experience of motherhood. A close reading of Slimani’s text suggests the need for a more measured response, both readerly and social, to the portrayal of supposedly monstrous maternal conduct. By creating a much-needed literary space that allows for the discussion of some of the less socially approved components and feelings of motherhood, Chanson douce dialogues with other current international cultural representations of maternal ambivalence—whether Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter and its recent filmic version, or Eliane Glaser’s Motherhood. It thereby promotes a more considered, contextualized understanding of the many and often contradictory experiences that make up mothering.

Autosociobiography: A Travelling Form

In Germanophone and Francophone literary spaces, a genre by the name of autosociobiography has recently been the subject of increased attention, with texts by Annie Ernaux, Didier Eribon, Christian Baron, Richard Hoggart and others frequently being mentioned in this regard. While individual cases, such as the French reception of Richard Hoggart, have been studied before, this essay takes a broader approach and examines English-, French- and German-language texts in order to trace the complex itinerary of autosociobiography and sketch out the history of this emerging form in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition, we explore how the emergence of autosociobiography relates to international and supranational developments such as the expansion of higher education, economic recession and the rise of Neoliberalism after the Trente Glorieuses. Autosociobiography – so runs our thesis – is an attempt to reinstall a logic of the general in a ‘society of singularities’. Finally, our essay discusses the methodological problems that will be encountered in the study of autosociobiography as a travelling genre.

Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text, by Sally Bushell

Reviewed by: Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text by Sally Bushell Ann C. Colley (bio) Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text, by Sally Bushell; pp. xvi + 335. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £75.00, $99.99. If any reader has consulted maps in the map room of the British Library or even visited Stanfords (established 1853), the variety inherent in the cartographic genre is evident and intriguing. Recently I examined late-eighteenth-century maps of the Lake District and was enthralled by the multiplicity of ways in which map makers had chosen to represent their subject. The genre’s complexity has now been extended for me by Sally Bushell’s Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text, a study that not only [End Page 715] explores the relationship between the literary map (as opposed to actual maps) and the text to which it corresponds but also engages the larger questions concerning the extent to which we map as we read and how to represent this reality. This book takes the reader on a comprehensive journey that explores the unique relationship between the literary map and the text in which it appears. Maintaining that “an experience of literary space is not the same as the mapping of the real world,” Bushell demonstrates just how fictional maps are not, as some mistakenly maintain, a mere illustration (91). She opens her study by contextualizing (almost exhaustively) her work within a review of ideas about the nature of mapping. She then offers a historical sense of the interdisciplinary relationships among literature, geography, and cartography from the twelfth to the nineteenth century. When constructing this frame, Bushell assembles voices of commentators that, although informative, almost overwhelm the opening chapter. I was impressed by Bushell’s grasp of this context yet wished to hear the guidance of her own voice. But that is to come, particularly when she addresses the question of how mapping is crucial to the interpretive part of reading fiction. Bushell raises interesting points throughout. She explores the possibility that a map cannot necessarily be trusted: it can manipulate a reader as well as the characters within the fiction. Moreover, her point that the literary map becomes a means by which fiction attempts to escape its own fictionality is suggestive. Furthermore, Bushell shows how a fictitious map is duplicitous: it faces outward to the reader and, at the same time, is present for the characters who are negotiating their sense of place. In addition, Bushell periodically returns to the paradox between the fixed, retrospective map and the sequential movement of a narrative. For those interested in Victorian fiction, Bushell devotes a significant part of the book to the integral function of literary maps within specific genres in the nineteenth century. In her words, these maps draw “attention to the fact that they are not intended to function in the same way as actual maps of the world” (91). To illustrate this experience, Bushell discusses the nature and use of fictional maps in such adventure and spy texts as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), and John Buchan’s Prester John (1910). She demonstrates the ways in which the literary map is a dynamic part of, yet exterior to, the text. These characteristics and the importance of spatial orientation are also at work in the detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. In the novels of Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Edmund Crispin, and Agatha Christie, the mapping is really based upon what Bushell terms “a human geography” that charts the human network of the mystery (128). It appears to be trustworthy and map the crime scene, yet often misleads and preys upon the gullibility of the reader. In this way, the act of mapping counters the genre’s supposedly objective form. After discussing the function of the map in adventure, spy, and detective fiction, Bushell turns her attention to maps in children’s fiction. She explores the map-text relationship in such works as Arthur Ransome’s Lake District series and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit...

Models of Spatial Polarities in Jamal Abu Hamdan’s Novels

The researchers’ interest in the setting and especially the element of place in the novel has long been discussed in relation to narrative discourse. The significance of place has surpassed its importance as an element of the plot to its connotative implications. Narrative space goes beyond a mere description of the surrounding setting to create polarities in relation to other harmonious elements. Juri Lotman refers to this relationship between literary space and other narrative elements as spatial polarity. Spatial polarity cannot be realized in isolation from other narrative elements such as time, characters, and events. Once narrative space has been exploited as a functional narrative element, it creates paradoxical semiotic significance which foreshadows other textual, geographic, referential, and functional significance. By analyzing the narrative blog by Jamal Abu Hamdan, the researchers introduce a study of spatial models and spatial polarities in Hamdan’s novels from a semiotic point of view.

Between nation, post-empire, and world-literature

African Lusophone literatures are largely a Portuguese product: the very construction of literary corpora though book editing and printing was mainly led by Portuguese publishers before and after independence. Other non-African institutions (universities, literary agents, critics) were largely responsible for that process of canonization in the Portuguese-speaking world, with repercussions in Africa itself.In the worlding of these already constituted African literary archives through translation, the grip of European agencies is even stronger: more than half of the published translation passes through the mediation of a single, Frankfurt-based literary agency. More than half of these books were funded by a translation support programme paid for by the Portuguese state.In this state of affairs, this article wishes to carry out a reflection on the institutional situation in which such literatures are produced, appear in book form and travel inside and outside the Portuguese-language literary space(s). It is my opinion, following and adapting Pascale Casanova’s suggestion, that a single literary work, in this specific case, can assume a threefold position: a national one, a specific position inside the Portuguese-language literary space and, finally, a world-literary one, thus oscillating between the dimension of nation-state, the post-imperial language community and the World Republic of Letters.I will resort to two case studies, exemplary of two divergent trajectories: José Eduardo Agualusa, possibly the most resonant example of internationalisation of an Angolan author; and João Melo, which appears to have a stronger national positioning and a much weaker international one.

Shifting Geographies and Literary Space in Pierre d'Avity’s The Estates, Empires, &amp; Principallities of the World (1615)

This essay examines the English translation by Edward Grimestone of Pierre d’Avity’s The Estates, Empires, &amp; Principallities of the World (1615), in relation to the French original, entitled Les Estats, Empires, et Principautez du Monde (1614), in order to show the interpenetration and contamination of geographic discourse in French and English. The argument is based on the notion of “literary space”—as in Maurice Blanchot's L'espace littéraire (1955)—which is the space developing "violently" (Blanchot 29) during the mutual contestation between the power of saying (“pouvoir de dire”) and the power of hearing (“pouvoir d’entendre”). D’Avity's geographic and cultural treatise is a metatext, combining human geography (sociology, history, religion, arts and literature) with economic geography, as well as demography and ethnography, as texts cross-polinate with other classical and early modern historical and geographic discourses. Literary space in d’Avity’s treatise is closely related to word, text, and image, so the French original and the English translation work like shifting and overlapping tectonic plaques, which interpenetrate with each other. Whereas the English version focuses pragmatically on European culture and its avatars, adding or omitting several places, according to the translator’s experience, the treatise in French offers a hugely comprehensive view of the world’s geographic space through the territories and the peoples it evokes. The treatise is inscribed in the niche of emerging seventeenth-century literary geography discourses, and the fact that its popularity has not survived for too long after this period is not a result of the text’s shortcomings, but of the competitive development of geographic and ethnographic knowledge.

"ПОЧЕМУ Я ОКАЗАЛСЯ ЗДЕСЬ?": ПРОСТРАНСТВО ПОТЕРЯННОЙ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ В ПЬЕСАХ "ТРИ СЕСТРЫ" А.П. ЧЕХОВА И "ЧЕРНАЯ ПУРГА" А.А. БУКРЕЕВОЙ

In the article, we make an attempt to study the interaction between the problematics of literary space and character’s identity in a dramaturgical work on the material of the plays “Three Sisters” by Anton Chekhov and “The Black Snowstorm” by Anastasia Bukreeva. The analysis is based on certain statements of chronotope theory developed by Mikhail Bakhtin. The paper considers the motif structure that in a certain way forms the literary space, in particular, the motifs of higher place and lower place, certain characteristics of the organization of space and time, such as isolation, “corpuscularity”, and cyclicity. An analysis is made of the complex interconnection between the place and the way of the characters’ self-determination, which is associated both with the structure of space and with the way the character perceives this space and himself within its boundaries. The nature of dramaturgy defines how the stage and off-stage spaces are organized, and the exploration of the significance of the off-stage chronotope may provide an additional perspective to navigating the character’s inner live determined by his perception of the place of acting. The purpose of this paper is to compare the approaches of the two playwrights to the existential aspects of literary space, as well as the problematics of the connection of a person’s identity with the world in which he finds himself for some reason.

Social and political agendas of American society in the new millennium (Salman Rushdie’s “Quichotte”)

The subject of the research is the artistic interpretation of social and political problems in Salman Rushdie’s novel Quichotte (2019). This work is a postmodern reinterpretation of Cervantes’s story about the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, which tackles a number of pressing issues, faced by American society at the beginning of the twenty-first century, from opioid addiction and migration to the environmental crisis and cyber-spies. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe those social and political triggers that, on the one hand, define today’s agenda of the American post-truth society, and on the other hand, appear to be kind of tags of the relevance and priority of the issues raised. Explication of the strategies of literary representation of such problems in the work of fiction reveals their relationship with the author’s worldview. The application of the methods of hermeneutic, intertextual, cultural, semantic, and linguistic-stylistic analyses enables us to study the author’s intentions in the literary space with an emphasis on the most topical concerns of contemporary issues. The literary forms representing the post-truth narratives in Rushdie’s novel are designed to expose the most troublesome issues in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen. The article examines the interpretation of such problems as the influence of mass media products, racism, and gender inequality, as well as some issues of language, ageism, and psychological pressure on children. The results of the study. The concept of post-truth, which penetrates fiction from public discourse to become a key means of explaining the author’s intentions and creating narratives of hyperreality, in Quichotte, appears as the prism through which all events, phenomena, and meanings are interpreted. Having become the main form of artistic vision, hyperreality appears in postmodern fiction to transform the contemporary literary landscape. This post-truth environment helps Rushdie see and analyse in detail the most crucial problems of American, or, in general, world society. They are manifested at all levels and in the actions of the characters, and the situations that happen to them, as well as in the author’s comments.

Literary Space as a Means of Historical Representation in Contemporary British and Belarusian Fiction

Artistic concepts of space in contemporary fiction remain one of the most important tools for explaining, evaluating, and interpreting a particular historical period. This article focuses on the comparative study of the functions of spatial images in the works of modern Belarusian and British writers: H. Mantel, P. Ackroyd, J. Crace, A. Miller, A. Arkush, L. Rublevskaya, V. Orlov, etc. The aim of the study is to identify various aspects, functions, and characteristics of literary landscapes in historical fiction and determine which of them are universal, and which are unique for authors from different countries. Based on the principles of the comparative method and the method of hermeneutic analysis, the author identifies and interprets universal spatial imagery of a house, ruins, a church, a gate, a bridge, and other significant landscape symbols. Also, she analyses the metaphor of the palimpsest in the diachronic aspect. The significance of literary visions of space in historical fiction is determined by its primary connection with the notions of culture and identity. More particularly, it is the strong historical associations that turn the national landscape into an element of cultural heritage, a repository of collective memory. This feature manifests itself in the motifs of return to the parental home (as a way of the character’s spiritual rebirth); unsuccessful restoration and architectural monstrosity as an expression of the loss of cultural codes of the past; mapping as a revolt against chaos; a revived murderous statue as a repressed, “haunting” history and its destructive influence on modern society. The perception of the physical landscape as a material form of the past determines its axiological potential. As a result, the images of Victorian architecture are used as symbols of lost greatness (P. Ackroyd, S. Waters, A. Byatt), and the images of modern (Soviet in Belarusian texts) buildings reflect the ontological emptiness and failure of the twentieth-century ideologies. The models of literary space in the texts analysed point to the perception of the historical process as a history of regress and degradation.

ФОРМУВАННЯ ОБРАЗУ ЛЕСІ УКРАЇНКИ В КИТАЙСЬКОМОВНОМУ ЛІТЕРАТУРНОМУ ПРОСТОРІ: ПСИХОЛІНГВІСТИЧНІ ТА СОЦІОКУЛЬТУРНІ ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ВЗАЄМОДІЇ МІЖ АВТОРОМ І ПЕРЕКЛАДАЧЕМ

Background. In the 20th century, Chinese literary scholars, in particular, Mao Dun, Ge Baoquan, and others, became actively interested in Lesya Ukrainka's work, which resulted in a number of translations of the writer's works into Chinese in the 1920s and 1990s. Taking into account the historical context of events in Chinese society during the 20th century, as well as analyzing the themes of the translated works of the Ukrainian poetess, the ideological prerequisites for the creation of these works were revealed. This research article focuses on the peculiarities of psycholinguistic interaction between the image of the author and the translator and analyses the impact of this interaction on the formation of a communicative link between them. In addition, the article analyses the image of women in China in the early 20th century, which allows us to identify analogies between the images of Lesia Ukrainka and the nineteenth-century Chinese poetess Qiu Jin (秋瑾，1875-1907), known for her anti-Manchu and revolutionary views. Methods. By using the imagological method and the method of contextual analysis, we analyzed the image of Lesia Ukrainka in Chinese culture, studied the historical background of its formation and the general trend of the development of the image of a woman in twentieth-century China. The historical and literary method and the method of data analysis were also used to compare the images of Lesya Ukrainka and Qiu Jin in the Chinese literary space. Results. The study found that most of Lesia Ukrainka's translations conveyed the ideas of love and longing for the country, patriotism, and the struggle for independence, which resonated with the ideological ideas of China in the 20th century and the image of an exemplary Chinese woman of that time, it was also emphasized in Soviet literary historiography (M. Zerov, S. Yefremov), which often served as a source for Chinese writers, thus forming a clichéd image of Lesya Ukrainka as a strong revolutionary fighting for the ideas of her country. Nevertheless, the kinship of Lesia Ukrainka's and Qiu Jin's creative leitmotifs, experiences and life paths complemented the already formed image of the Ukrainian writer with elements of heroism and poetry borrowed from the figure of Qiu Jin, which gave Lesia and her work in the Chinese literary environment elements of romanticism. Conclusions . In conclusion, the article is put forward that it is the association with Qiu Jin that has significantly influenced the images and symbolism of Chinese translations of Lesia Ukrainka's poetry, which requires further detailed study of the texts of translations from the point of view of the imagological aspect.

КОНЦЕПЦИЯ КОГНИТИВНОГО МОДЕЛИРОВАНИЯ ТЕКСТОВОГО ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО ПРОСТРАНСТВА

The article presents the theory of cognitive modeling of literary text space aimed at a comprehensive cognitive interpretation of proxeme text code. A typology of text cognitive constructs is proposed. This typology includes six types such as: literary concept, cognitive-plot matrix of literary text, text cognitive links, cognitive coordinates of literary text, cognitive text space models, cognitive text temporal models. The research presents the author’s algorithm for modeling and interpreting text proxeme constructs applied to studying the cognitive model of nominative field of concept SPACE and offers the typology of literary space nominees consisting of proxemes’ types such as: (1) words with prepositions as space markers, (2) verbs of movement or location in space, (3) place names, (4) landscape units as landscape nominations. It is revealed that proxemes have the form of a word or phrases that can be single-component or multi-component nominees. According to the method of functioning proxemes are divided into personalised proxemes and non-personalised proxemes. The existence of anthropocentrically marked and anthropocentrically unmarked models of literary space is justified.

Интертекстуальность и трансформация архетипа как основа полисемии современной сказки-модификации

In the modern English-language literary space the genre of short prose, based on the plots of classical fairy tales and addressed primarily to an adult audience, is extremely popular. Over half a century already, this genre has emerged as a separate discourse (in this article, the authors call it a “Reimagined Fairy Tale,” considering the memory of the genre). Such modificated fairy tale is simultaniously the result of the postmodern world perception (intertextuality, playfulness, gamification, multilevel text, irony, etc.) and a critical thought (deconstruction, denial of logocentrism), and represents an extensive material for research both from the point of view of literary criticism and from interdisciplinary positions. Using the example of the modern literary tale by R. Shirman “Hunger,” which is based on the folk story about Hansel and Gretel, the authors attempt to trace how the multilevel coding of the text takes place using the transformation of Jungian archetypes and deconstruction of binary oppositions that underlie them on the one hand, and literary and religious reminiscences, and allusions on the other. The authors trace how the text passes into the category of open ones and allows the reader to choose himself which of the meanings of the tale is closer to him. According to the authors, this methodology is applicable to all texts of a given genre and can be productive as a way of reading, and also useful for clarifying the genre features of a modern fairy tale-modification.

Рецепция Пруста в России в 1920-е гг.

The article traces the history of the reception of Marcel Proust’s works in Russia, which began in the 1920s. The problem of studying the perception of Proust’s literary heritage, which has not yet been fully investigated, is of particular importance, since it allows us to touch upon a number of important issues of theoretical and historical-literary plans. Proust as an object of research is chosen here not by chance. In the world literary space there are special constant values, which, if to compare with various artistic phenomena, allows us to understand their artistic value, to follow the change of axiological parameters that determine the state of a particular stage of the literary process and to identify the main directions of development in it. Reception in the Russian culture works by Proust, which, of course, is one of such values, deserves special attention and study, since it reveals important moments not only in the creative activity of the French writer, but also in the development of Russian fiction and literary criticism. Based on the analysis of numerous documentary evidences contained in periodicals (“The Modern West,” “The Press and the Revolution,” “On a literary post,” etc.), theoretical and literary-critical works of authoritative literary critics (N.Y. Berkovsky, V.V. Weidle, B.A. Griftsov, A.K. Voronsky, etc.), in the statements of famous writers (O.E. Mandelstam, V.V. Mayakovsky, Y.K. Olesha, I. Ilf and E. Petrov), research reveals how the attitude to the works by Proust in the specified period of Soviet literature development, which is characterized by the coexistence and confrontation of various schools and trends (“Forge,” “Pass,” RAPP, LEF, etc.), helps to clarify their aesthetic orientation.

Феномен транснационализма в романах А. Хидера

In modern realities, works written by immigrant authors have become an integral part of the multinational culture of Germany. A native of Iraq, Abbas Khider is one of the most prominent representatives of the immigrant segment of German-language literature in Germany. The difficulties that arise during the integration of refugees into the multicultural European society represent a topical issue in the current context of globalization, which explains the popularity of this theme in works by immigrant writers. The subject of the article is the phenomenon of transnationalism in A. Khider’s novels. The study analyzes four works of the author – The Village Indian (2008), The President’s Oranges (2011), A Slap in the Face (2016), and Letter to the Eggplant Republic (2013). The article aims to investigate how the phenomenon of transnationalism is represented in A. Khider’s works. The research objectives were as follows: to consider and clarify the term ‘transnationalism’ in the context of modern progressive globalization; to analyze the transnational models of relations reflected in the system of images of the works under consideration; to explore the formation of the characters’ self-identification. The study is novel in that it represents the first attempt in Russian literary criticism to analyze certain features of the poetics of A. Khider’s novels, in particular the phenomenon of transnationalism as presented in the literary space created by the author. The results of the study expand the understanding of the state of modern German-language literature, with works of immigrant writers being its integral part.

Heterotopie i nie-miejsca w powieści Jany Wagner „Pandemia”

Yana Vagner’s novel To the Lake (2011) is called prophetic because the writer faithfully depicted a state of global pandemic, when there was no real-world precedent to such a situation in a contemporary setting. A pandemic is not only a litmus test that allows one to determine the state of society and the individual when faced with extreme conditions, but also a force that transforms reality. This article describes the peculiarities of the literary space in Vagner’s novel, as well as spatial metamorphoses caused by a fast spreading virus. The study is based on Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopia and Marc Augé’s concept of non-places, and leads to the conclusion that the pandemic leads to the expansion of “no-man’s spaces” and heterotopic spaces. This includes residential buildings, vehicles, roads, towns, villages and cemeteries. The article also examines the parallels drawn by Vagner between the epidemiological catastrophe and World War II.

Architectural References within Émile Zola’s Novel, The Ladies’ Paradise

The depiction of space in literature is crucial to every story as it guides the reader’s imagination regarding the story’s location and the characters’ surroundings. This paper studies the relationship between architecture, interiors, and literary spaces by using a methodology that draws on architectural literary analysis, a methodology that uses literature as a medium to define and analyze architectural spaces and cues. Specifically, it investigates the connections between architectural and spatial references and their influences on societal concerns in literature – the literary space within The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), a novel by Émile Zola (1840-1902). The retail space portrayed within the novel dominates the narrative. Thus, the architectural spaces are described to support the storyline. These spatial cues indicate a specific overall theme, namely capitalism – an important issue to discuss within architectural discourse. Zola reveals a new perspective on the social and architectural impacts on society under capitalism through the public interior space of Ladies’ Paradise. The research also indicates the correlation between architecture, public space, and retailing culture through the birth of the “department store,” thus forever altering society’s ideology on retail culture. Although the novel is categorized as fictitious, the representation of 19th-century retailing culture, women’s role within society, and the significance of architecture are shown to be realistic to that time. In conclusion, this paper reveals the dialogue between architecture, societal gender issues, and the evolvement of retail culture through the medium of literature and derives lessons from this dialogue.

LITERATURE OF EMIGRATION. EXPERIENCE OF HISTORICAL PROSE IN THE FIELD OF FOREIGN CULTURE

Historical novel, as a special genre formation born of Romanticism, has become an artistic tool for the reproduction of the past, its discovery and invention. Historical prose is the literary space where two worldview narrative strategies intersect, overlap, and sometimes collide: these are history that (in its academic sense) seeks to recreate the ‘true past’, and literature, which is a particular representation and development of the world. Historical prose of Ukrainian emigration appears as a fairly integral literary and aesthetic phenomenon during two interwar decades of the 20th century and ends at the border of the 1990s — aft er Ukraine gained its independence. For nations that lost their statehood, the return of the past, its glorification is an important means of forming national identity and self-consciousness. The historical novel of the Ukrainian emigration is a relentless attempt to root its next generations in the national tradition of collective memory.&#x0D; In general, for societies in which the state tradition has been interrupted, historical prose can be an essential factor in restoring / maintaining national memory, as well as a means of creating national myths, projecting the past into modern problems of a stateless nation, and preserving national traditions. The historical prose of the Ukrainian emigration was actually focused on these aims, taking responsibility for the nationalist and philosophic perspective rooted in the past in order to preserve and increase it in the future. The aspiration and experience of Ukrainian emigration in other countries carries a number of tasks that it set for itself. Th ese were, in particular, the preservation of the native language, culture, and creative activity, including historical prose on the themes prohibited in the mainland literature, the formation of the strategy of collective memory through historical prose.