Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in YugoslaviaThis book focuses on the cultural processes by which the idea of a Yugoslav nation was developed and on the reasons that this idea ultimately failed to bind the South Slavs into a viable nation and state. The author argues that the collapse of multinational Yugoslavia and the establishment of separate uninational states did not result from the breakdown of the political or economic fabric of the Yugoslav state; rather, that breakdown itself sprang from the destruction of the concept of a Yugoslav nation. Had such a concept been retained, a collapse of political authority would have been followed by the eventual reconstitution of a Yugoslav state, as happened after World War II, rather than the creation of separate nation-states. Because the author emphasizes nation building rather than state building, the causes and evidence he cites for Yugoslavia’s collapse differ markedly from those that have previously been put forward. He concentrates on culture and cultural politics in the South Slavic lands from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in order to delineate those ideological mechanisms that helped lay the foundation for the formation of a Yugoslav nation in the first place, sustained the nation during its approximately seventy-year existence, and led to its dissolution. The book describes the evolution of the idea of Yugoslav national unity in four major areas: linguistic policies geared to creating a shared national language, the promulgation of a Yugoslav literary and artistic canon, an educational policy that emphasized the teaching of literature and history in schools, and the production of new literary and artistic works incorporating a Yugoslav view. In the book’s conclusion, the author discusses the relevance of the Yugoslav case for other parts of the world, considering whether the triumph of particularist nationalism is inevitable in multinational states. |
What people are saying - Write a review
We haven't found any reviews in the usual places.
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
The Rise of the Yugoslav National Idea | 19 |
Creating a Synthetic Yugoslav Culture | 67 |
Brotherhood and Unity | 128 |
The Precipitous Rise and Calamitous | 173 |
Notes | 249 |
287 | |
297 | |
Other editions - View all
Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in ... Andrew Wachtel No preview available - 1998 |
Common terms and phrases
Albanian appeared artistic attempts Balkan Belgrade believe bian Bosnian bridge brotherhood and unity central claim Communist Cosic create creation Croats and Slovenes despite dialect epic ethnic European existence fact goslav Habsburg heroic ideal identity Illyrian intellectuals interwar Istref Ivan Mestrovic Ivo Andric journal Khazars Kosovo Kraljevic Krleza linguistic literary language Macedonian major Marko Marko Kraljevic Mazuranic Mestrovic's Milos Crnjanski Miroslav Krleza Montenegrin Moslem Mountain Wreath multicultural multinational narrator national culture nationalist Nazor nineteenth century Njegos Njegos's Nova Evropa novel oral particularly partisan Pavic's percent period poem poet poetry political postwar Preradovic prewar published question readers schools seen separate Serbian culture Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian language Serbs Serbs and Croats single Slavs Slovenes Slovenian socialist realism South Slavic lands story supranational synthesis texts tion tional tradition tural Ujevic unified unitarist Ustashas World writers Yugo Yugoslav culture Yugoslav literature Yugoslav nation Yugoslavia Zagreb
Popular passages
Page v - In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident...
Page vi - My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word's multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind.