Автор: David Norris
Название: Haunted Serbia: Representations of History and War in the Literary Imagination
Издательство: Routledge
Год: 2016
Серия: Legenda
ISBN: 1909662658; 9781909662650
Язык: English
Формат: epub, pdf
Размер: 12,4 mb
Страниц: 200
For ease in presenting the different emphases between the depiction of history and war, this study is divided into two parts. The first part refers to the literature of the 1980s when writers in Serbia took a critical look at many of the assumptions about the nature of Yugoslav society, its historical roots, and the role of the state’s founding myths. Turning to the conflicts of the past, they explored these issues, extracting memories which were all but forgotten and questioning the traditionally positive views of Partisan heroism in the Second World War. Serbian authors created a new historical fiction, reinvigorated by the pain of history and the hurt of war, in which traces of past conflicts were given fresh significance with haunting and grotesque images. They animated the spectres of the past by exploring the making of memory and the writing of history, examining how the stories of the past no longer met the demands of the present. As historians and others also began re-examining old certainties, gaps of omission and of distortion in the official state narrative were revealed. As belief in the orthodox historical record mined to suspicion, the cracks multiplied opening the way for the ghosts of the past to return and haunt the sites on which the Yugoslav state and its socialist future were built. The second part of this study concerns the literary response to the deepening chaos of the following decade seen in the wake of a contemporary conflict, the Wars of Yugoslav Succession 1991-95.
The instability of this period of transition is deepened during the wars of the 1990s, when authors turn from the memory of past violence to face the ferocious brutality of new conflicts. The haunting evocations in their work continue to articulate fresh uncertainties as the trappings of modern civilization are stripped away and replaced by the destructive logic of civil war. The past returns once more with renewed energy in the struggle to make sense of a vastly changed world.
