Wars, traumas, and identities in the Serbian novel 1991-2021 (I)

Abstract

This paper briefly introduces the general attitudes that some of the most prominent Serbian writers formulated about war and trauma, as well as national and supranational self-understanding. In the second part of the paper, on the examples of contemporary novels, the author deals with the circular-evocative paradigm as one of the magistral choices in the literary treatment of the personal and/or collective war traumas. It is based on repetitive recognition of past events and their meanings in the present situations as a kind of collectively understandable, circular identity pattern.