Original scientific paper
Who killed The Little Match Girl, and whom (killed) the Little Red Riding Hood? Or: about (postmodern) Croatian crime fiction.
Boris Škvorc
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Split, Croatia
Abstract
This work provides a short overview of Croatian crime fiction with special attention placed on the form as it developed during the time of a Communist regime and afterwards. In the article the author claims that the crime fiction and the forms of fantastic prose that eventuated from this genre in the Croatian vernacular are of utmost
importance for the development of post-modern Croatian prose. It is also suggested that this genre generated a certain amount of political awareness that undermined the stable picture of the canon as a diachronic chain of works without consideration of the subaltern voices/utterances othern to the hegemony of cultural power. In central part of the work two contemporary novels with strong subversive power at the formal level are discussed and analyzed. They are presented as representatives of post -modern, post-ethical prose and as the Croatian answer to post-crime fiction on the global
scene. The work also suggests that the deviation from the scheme that is very often considered to be the main characteristic of the genre, in fact represents the literary value that enabled the creative interaction between the trivial and high art, mixing the popular and exclusively hegemonic in an unlikely fusion of post-modernity, either
politically or in the realm of poetics and style.
Keywords
Crime fiction; Croatian model; corpus; canon; competency of reading; genealogy of genre; postmodern deconstruction of the model
Hrčak ID:
136246
URI
Publication date:
10.3.2012.
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