Naslov
History Employed by the Present: The Case of 1930s Representation after 1945

Autori
Lovrić, Sanja

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
Children's Literature Association 40th Annual Conference: Play and Risk in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Mjesto i datum
Biloxi (MS), Sjedinjene Američke Države, 13.06.2013. - 15.06.2013

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Nije recenziran

Ključne riječi
representation; 1930s in Croatian Children's Literature; literary memory; canon; cultural selection; ideology

Sažetak
This paper will focus on the representation of the 1930s in Croatian children's literature as an example of how extraliterary and historical context can influence canon establishment and literary memory (Assman, 2008). In the period after the Second World War, when Croatia became (again) a federative component of Yugoslavia, only now in the circumstances of a communist regime, society was experiencing deep changes through strong ideological control over all public and state services. This ideologically imposed system of value can be maybe the most plastically observed on the example of children’s literature. On the one side, the ideological influence becomes obvious if we look at the themes of children’s literature works published after 1945, and on the other side, what is most interesting for our research, the historical survey of children’s literature gets an entirely new dimension. And while an older part of Croatian history of children’s literature undergoes only new selection processes (Williams, 2006) of an already established canon system, the representation of the 1930s becomes crucial for further understanding of the pre-war period. Creation of the representation and the canon of the 1930s in the period after 1945 becomes the central point of our analysis, directed mainly to the exploration of different actions and motifs aimed at “adjusting” history to the needs of the post-war period. As at that point in time the cultural and literary memory of the pre-war history was still very much alive, a newly built canon highlighted only one, small part of the history and only the minor part of literary works which were important for the dominant post-war perspective. Due to the systematical repression, the rest of the literary works will soon be forgotten (Assman, 2008). Process of the new canon creation will completely overbridge and suppress the gap over the war period (1941-1945) and attempt to represent the post-war present as a logical consequence of the movement started in the 1930s. The illusion of continuity is achieved by a careful choice of canonical works and by the representation of just one (desirable) dimension of the period having basically only one major role: self-identification and description of the present rather than the past.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA