Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol51no208
Post-Yugoslav Women Writers Writing Yugoslavia: In Search of a Lost Past and its Literary Consequences
Tijana Matijević
Abstract
This paper presents an analysis of works of contemporary women writers from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, offering an explanation of how the discussions of post-Yugoslav literature were possible in the first place and what the essential features of this literature would be. The search for the past is one of the basic literary pursuits of post-Yugoslav women writers. The past in question is a Yugoslav past. However, even though the facts show that Yugoslavia did exist, it existed in the past, which means that it no longer exists. The ambivalence of the simultaneous fictional and real existence of Yugoslavia creates congruence between the status of literature (which is also defined by its relation towards the real and the fictional) and the status of the past. This congruence is developed further through melancholy, ultimately literarizing the melancholy of the past, thus making it an element of the literary text. The use of ironic, autofictional and metafictional strategies creates one of the chronotopes of post-Yugoslav literature – Yugoslavia as the past.
Keywords
post-Yugoslav women writers, the past, melancholy, chronotope, metafiction
Hrčak ID:
130717
URI
Publication date:
15.12.2014.
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