THE SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT OF THE VICTORIAN ERA AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE POETICS OF PSYCHOLOGISM

This article investigates the sociocultural context of the Victorian era (1837-1901) and its determining influence on the formation of psychologism as a dominant literary poetics in English fiction. The study examines four key factors of the epoch: rapid industrialisation and class transformation, the crisis of religious identity, the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline, and the transformation of gender roles. These factors are treated as principal determinants of authors' deepening interest in the inner life of the individual. The methodological foundation combines historical-literary and comparative-typological analysis. Drawing on the novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, the article demonstrates how social pressures were systematically transformed into artistic devices for representing the consciousness of fictional characters. The findings contribute to an understanding of the genesis of the psychological novel as the dominant genre in literature at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and establish a framework of social psychologism as a defining feature of the Victorian literary imagination.