The ‘Belgrade Circle’ : Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol and Tolstoy in Serbian interwar comics

As not everyone knows, the ‘Belgrade Circle’, the collective of comics authors who ushered in the so-called ‘Golden Age of Serbian comics’ (from the 1930s until WW II), had many Russian émigrés among its members. This contribution mainly deals with their practice of adapting the nineteenth-century literary classics of their home country into the comics medium

(Ultra)Minor Comics? Opening Up the History of (Post-)Yugoslav and Bulgarian Comics to Outsiders

The last decade saw the publication of more and more monographs (partially) devoted to the history of comics (and/or graphic novels) in smaller or larger geographical/cultural areas around our globe. In this article I first focus on what – if anything – (the relevant chapters in) several of these books tell their readers about the history of comics in the former Republic of Yugoslavia and its successor states, and in Bulgaria, the other Slavic country on the Balkan Peninsula. In doing so, I discuss a (‘Cold War’) misperception about East European comics. In the second part, I probe the usefulness of extending the application range of the terms ‘minor [literatures]’ and ‘ultraminor [literatures]’ to the field of comics, whereupon I put forward some suggestions on how future contributions – scholarly and other – to the cultural transmission or opening up of the history of (post-)Yugoslav and Bulgarian comics, as well as those of countries/nations/language areas with comparable traditions, could look like

Eulogizing Realism : Documentary Chronotopes in Nineteenth-Century Prose Fiction

In this contribution we try to probe the generic chronotope of realism, which, judging from its astonishing productivity in the nineteenth century and the profound impact it has had on literary evolution and theory ever since, can be designated nothing less than a hallmark in the general history of narrative. Although we are primarily concerned with the description of the principles of construction underlying the realistic, “documentary”, chronotope, we would also like to touch upon some of its rather evident, but still somewhat under-discussed similarities with the genre of historiography. For, despite an abundance of what could be called “touches of realism” in a plethora of literary texts and genres (both narrative and poetic) since the very beginnings of literary history itself, the direct germs of realism as it developed into a particular narrative genre or generic chronotope during the nineteenth century may well be situated in “prescientific” historiographical works such as those of Gibbon or Michelet

The life of Saint Thaïs in Bulgarian translation

The Life of Saint Thaïs is the shortest of the three vitae in the medieval Bulgarian Vidin Miscellany (Bdinski sbornik, 1360) that are devoted to so-called ‘holy harlots’.This contribution wants to give the reader an idea of how such texts looked like and functioned