Performing Individualism. Two Tendencies Dismantling War Imagery in Croatian and Serbian Historical Novels of the 1960s

Abstract

The article aims at addressing the question of representations of World War Two in Croatian and Serbian literature that were subversive in the sense that they queried the legend not simply by rejecting communism and affirming nationalism, but by emphasizing the uncertainty and sensibility of the human beings, a typical modern reaction to violence and, in general, modernist topoi. In this article I will focus on modernist novelistic representations of the 1960s in which the uncertainty and instability of collective warrants are foregrounded. As a result a subversive meaning is produced which contradicts not only communism and revolution but more generally war as such, including the universal features of war such as confronting loneliness, love as an expression of an individual rather than a collective sense of existence, and the impossibility of a valid representation of past events.

Keywords

• war literature
• fiction
• croatian literature
• serbian literature
• yugoslav memory
• modern novel