At the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new generation of artists came to Ukrainian literature, among which the female writers – Natalya Kobrynska, Olga Kobylyanska, Uliana Kravchenko, Dniprova Chayka, Yevgeniya Yaroshynska and others – play a prominent role. This generation puts the women’s idea at the height of the most critical issues of contemporary social reality. The end of the XIX century is marked by the powerful infl uence and spread of the feminist movement. The ideas of women’s emancipation, in particular the material and spiritual liberation of women, her right to self-fulfi llment and overcoming of established stereotypes, became a powerful factor in themodernization of life, life, social and private relations in the late nineteenth century. Women’s themes
and feminist ideas are widely represented in the works of the above mentioned writers. In general, feminine creativity was one of the most modernist discoveries, a completely new phenomenon in the Ukrainian literature. In the writings of writers there were new heroes who could already tell about their own desires and aspirations. A woman has got more opportunities for self-realization, self-affi rmation.
Key words: feminism, female prose, emancipation, heroine, interpretation, identity, feminist theory