mass literature

In the history of culture and literature, women have always played an important role. Numerous myths, folklore and literary works show the importance of female characters in the content, functional and artistic solution of various problems. In recent decades, attention to the “women’s issue” has certainly increased: representatives of various scientific disciplines are trying to identify the essence of the phenomenon of “true femininity”. In popular literature, a new type of heroine is being formed – a girl undergoing her own set of challenges (quest).

The article analyzes literary texts and critical speeches of women and men-writers of the turn of the 19th – early 20th centuries, where the gender role models of the “new woman” and “superwoman” received the most vivid and original embodiment. Both models of femininity reflected the breaking of the usual gender order and the formation of a new system of values, in literature itself as well. The complex of feminist ideas associated with these types of models interested not only representatives of “high” literature.

The article considers self-referential items in the oeuvre of Gaston Leroux – the master of a popular novel – particularly on the example of the Rouletabille cycle. The author pays closer attention to the novel Rouletabille and the Tsar in which Leroux inserted the data from his earlier articles and sketches about Russia.

The article presents a review of K. A. Chekalov’s monograph on mass French literature of the end of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th centuries. The author studies the genre, thematic and stylistic changes in popular works on the example of the oeuvre of Gaston Leroux and other famous novelists of the ‘Belle Epoque’ (Leblanc, Souvestre, Allain etc.).

The article proposes an approach to consider modern mass literature portraying doctors in line with the revival of the tradition of the occupational novel. There are traces of similarities with the genre canon at the plot-compositional, figurative and stylistic levels of the text. The differences between contemporary works and the established Soviet model of the genre are also highlighted.