Icons of Serbian Romanticism as heroes of contemporary popular literature

Abstract

The  paper  discusses  the  presence  of  two  icons  of  Serbian  romanticism  in contemporary culture. The male icon, Petar Petrovic Njegos (1813–1851), and the female one, Milica Stojadinovic Srpkinja (1828–1878), are presented. The main claim of the paper is that after the demise of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s, when a new national identity reemerged, few women writers introduced the central figures of romanticism as main characters in their prose works in order to take part in feminist and national discourse. This tendency is illustrated with Milica Micic Dimovska’s novel Last Fascinations of MSS (1996) and Ljubica Arsic’s short story The Other One Who Waits in the Dark Night (1998). However, in the first decade of 21st century, these icons of romanticism also became heroes of popular literature. The case of Isidora Bjelica and her two prose works Secret Life of P. P. Njegos (2007) and The Serbian Woman (2009) illustrates this point.