Literary representation of the First World War in the context of bećarac

Review article

Abstract

Bećarac is a sung record of a personal tragedy, or an authentic artefact of historical events at a particular territory. Since many such verses have been written in Slavonia, the author has found it important to analyse the discourse of war. The aim of this paper is to show, by using comparative and interpretative methods of reading verses and historical facts, how local people apprehended war events, which consequences it had on their lives and the way of thinking about the horrors of the war, how this topic was present in the everyday coexistence of conflict and tolerance, and whether it is possible to give a credible account of the first World War though these verses. Is it possible to come to objective information based on these texts which were made out of pure subjectivity? The corpus consists of the songs from the first half of the twentieth century.