Dystopia while deconstructing utopian ideas generates a special type of identity as a consequence of a deviation from anthropocentric principles, crises of national and cultural worldviews, and changes in manifestations of social shifting in the posthumanist world. The article has focused on four symptomatic dystopian texts – George Orwell’s Nineteen Forty-Eight, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Ahmed K. Towfik’s Utopia, and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte – to explicate the dichotomous nature of the opposition of identity vs society in the posthumanist transformations. Those conditions are considered a cause of the mutation of dystopian identity that troubles its anthropological bases and modes of existence. To reconstruct the posthumanist context and its influence on the dystopian identities in the selected novels, this study has exploited a mixture of the following methods: intertextual, cultural, and genre ones; phenomenological approach; hermeneutic interpretation; conceptualisation, etc. The novelty of the study emanates from the very attempt to interpret the writers’ names of the AGEs which are represented in the books as a background of storytelling and a lens through which the posthumanist space is transformed from a dystopian perspective.

The article focuses on the strategies of reconstructing communicative space between the author and reader as well as forecasting the emotional impact on the reader through transforming textual reality. The emotiogenic characteristics of fictional discourse provide the emotional perception of literary texts since emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Such a perception is made possible by the identification, comprehension, and interpretation of the emotionally significant textual components of different types. The authors of the article have classified them as the following: graphical and visual, punctuation, and semantic-stylistic ones. These means, found in the postmodern novels by Salman Rushdie, Tahereh Mafi, Marina Lewycka, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alexandar Hemon, and Stephen King, have been analysed to explicate the character of the phenomenon of emotiogenic fictional narratives. The emotiogenic means in the selected novels are exploited by the writers of different ethnic affiliations that can be resulted from their multicultural experience. The superimposition of some means is explained by their semantic relationship. The article tests a hypothesis that the cognitive architecture of the emotiogenic means is determined by an emotional situation reflected in a literary text that appears to be a special code through which readers interpret their emotional and evaluative meanings. The indicators of the text’s emotionality occur to be signs of the textual representation of emotional knowledge. This study contributes to the investigation of the emotiogenic means of creating communicative space which are considered those discursive expressive elements that affect the perception of textual reality.

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.

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The article reviews the historical and literary background of a new poesy that appeared to be an outcome of the accumulation and release of the new poets’ creative energy in late medieval Europe. We primarily deal with the poesy of the Sicilian school and the Dolce Stil Nuovo (‘sweet new style’). The interest of literary criticism in the historical and cultural background of influential literary phenomena, which have not lost their relevance, is defined by the need for reinterpreting them in new paradigms. The methods of cultural, historical, biographical, hermeneutic, and comparative analyses as well as the method of generalisation have been exploited for this research. The European poetic tradition has passed a long way in searching for new forms and means of the artistic representation of reality. The emergence of the Sicilian School on the Apennine Peninsula in the 13th century became the initial stage of the literary and linguistic history of the Old World. It marked the beginning of Italian poesy the development of the Dolce Stil Nuovo and was largely the forerunner of Dante’s and Petrarch’s poems, laying the foundations of the philosophy of lyric poetry. The Sicilians gave a powerful impetus to the further development of poetic theory, images, and themes, which would be pivotal in stilnovismo, as well as to the assimilation of many authors of the Renaissance in Europe. The appeal to certain themes and motives as well as their transformation highlighted the idea of Sicilian authors about poetry as a specific kind of philosophy. We emphasise that the time of origination and a highly cultured environment have caused the refinement of art forms and stylistic devices for revealing the conceptual content of such verses. Giacomo da Lentini reconceptualised the approaches to rhyming and poetising, and most importantly — to the psychological perception of reality and understanding of love in the metaphysical dimension. The ideological and aesthetic unity of the poets of the Dolce Stil Nuovo, who developed the innovations of da Lentini, made it possible to relate them with the writers of the early Renaissance. The article also focuses on the specifics of literary activity during the expansion of new European poetry leading to the invention of a sonnet as the poetic form that follows a particular rhyming pattern.