Social Orphanhood in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature for Children and Young People

Abstract

The artistic interpretation of the theme of social orphanhood in contemporary literature for children and young people is a reaction by writers to social phenomena affecting the child. In this article, I explore the artistic representation of social orphanhood in contemporary Ukrainian literature for children and young people. I note that the works of Ukrainian writers complement the tradition of depicting orphans in world literature. The paper goes on to analyse the plots of works about children who become social orphans as a result of the labour migration of parents, to define a range of issues raised within this topic considering the images of orphans, and to derive a typology based on an analysis of their behavioural patterns. The common and distinctive features of the poetics of works on orphaned childhood are noted, and images are presented of orphans in Ukrainian and world literature, taking into account the results of research by Melanie A. Kimball, Claudia Mills, and Dirk P. Mattson.