04/03/2023
Between living memory and actual political trends: New Historical Wave in Slavic literatures of Central-Eastern Europe
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ABSTRACT
The article reviews and analyzes the ways of representing historical topics in the contemporary fiction of Central and Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Slovakia). After significant turn from the western-oriented consumerist culture of the 90s and early 2000s to the search for new formulas of national identities in the late 2000s the authors from this region began to rethink the historical material. Three ways of this rethinking (and correspondingly, three groups of texts) can be outlined: the first, most analytical, innovative, and corresponding to Barbara Misztal’s „public history“; the second, intended to strengthen official national historical narratives; and the third, using clichés and stereotypes of popular culture to subvert conservative, isolationist rhetoric of current political establishment.
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ABSTRACT
The article reviews and analyzes the ways of representing historical topics in the contemporary fiction of Central and Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Slovakia). After significant turn from the western-oriented consumerist culture of the 90s and early 2000s to the search for new formulas of national identities in the late 2000s the authors from this region began to rethink the historical material. Three ways of this rethinking (and correspondingly, three groups of texts) can be outlined: the first, most analytical, innovative, and corresponding to Barbara Misztal’s „public history“; the second, intended to strengthen official national historical narratives; and the third, using clichés and stereotypes of popular culture to subvert conservative, isolationist rhetoric of current political establishment.