Hrvatska moderna antiratna književnost (Croatian Modern Anti-War Literature)

The project Modern Croatian anti-War Literature lays the foundation for a systematic, methodologically contemporary and multi-perspective study of modern Croatian anti-war literature in its discursive and historical context, combining for the first time a comprehensive overview of the relevant foreign literature with a contemporary theoretical and methodological framework applied to a representative literary corpus and archival research of previously unexplored material. Motivated by the current historical situation, in which such research questions are rapidly gaining relevance, the members of the research team have decided to respond to the chronic neglect of the systematic academic study of anti-war literature and to create the prerequisites for its reassessment and repositioning in the fields of literary history and literary criticism. The research will focus on three thematic nodes – two world wars and the Homeland War – and will address anti-war literature as a literary genre and social phenomenon, i.e. its structural features, but also its political and ethical implications; its role in promoting the culture of memory, the articulation of testimony and trauma, the formation of shared values, the development of anti-war consciousness and resistance to warmongering ideologies and totalitarian practices. In doing so, the research will overcome the historicizing positivism and heteroclitic sequences of thematic overviews that prevailed in earlier approaches to anti-war literature in both the Croatian and international scholarly communities. This makes the research innovative not only in Croatia, but also in the international context. As we are aware of the social significance of the issues we are dealing with, an important aspect of the project will be dissemination that is not limited to a professional audience, but also reaches broader social groups such as practitioners in education or non-professional readers.

Researching the many levels, types, and phenomena surrounding anti-war literature in Croatia and as influenced by world literature (including formal aspects)