Bosnian Authors in a European Window: A Comparative Study

The study compares three Bosnian writers of the 20th century to three European literature titans, highlighting their connections and differences. It challenges ethnic autarkies and opens the door to a comprehensive literary universe. It also explores the profundity of Mak Dizdars relation to Homer, the use of double-voiced discourse in Fyodor Dostoevsky and Meša Selimović's works, and the scapegoat and martyr motifs in Ivo Andrić's Bridge on the Drina and Leo Tolstoys War and Peace.

Format: Hardback
Length: 92 pages
Publication date: 06 December 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

The study places the three most important Bosnian writers of the twentieth century incisively and firmly next to three titans of European literature.
Drawing upon comparative literature's ethos, the study resists the ethnic autarkies embedded in the secondary literature that currently frame the Bosnian authors.

The study opens the door wide to a literary universe, inclusive and comprehensive.

Drawing upon Harold Bloom's theory of literary criticism in The Anxiety of Influence, the study shows the profundity of Mak Dizdar's relation to Homer: Homer, as Bloom would say, returns from the dead in Dizdar's modern, existential verse.

The study shows how not only Fyodor Dostoevsky but also Meša Selimović masterfully dramatize the double-voiced discourse that Mikhail Bakhtin calls heteroglossia: Their narrators' gripping dialogues are enmeshed in another's thoughts.

The use of the scapegoat motif in Ivo Andrić's Bridge on the Drina and the martyr motif in Leo Tolstoys War and Peace reveal a dialectic that structures the drama and pathos of these two historical novels.

Weight: 349g
Dimension: 216 x 138 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032619637