mass literature

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.

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 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.