LITERATURE, POWER AND IMAGINATION: THE QUEST FOR DYSTOPIA IN THE BULGARIAN NOVEL OF THE 21st CENTURY
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Date
2024-04-21
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Plovdiv University Press “Paisii Hilendarski”
Abstract
The study opens with the question: Why wasn't there a powerful wave of satire in Bulgarian literature in the first two decades of the 21st century, even though the situation of the Transition closely resembled the situation that spawned the satire of Ivan Vazov, Aleko Konstantinov and Stoyan Mikhailovsky a hundred years earlier? The answer to this question is found in the compensatory emergence and rapid rise of a genre that had been virtually absent: the dystopian novel. This article traces the process in which two dozen dystopian works were published in twelve years; their number helps defining an already remarkable phenomenon in Bulgarian literary history. Among the authors discussed are famous writers such as Georgi Gospodinov, Zahari Karabashliev, Emilia Dvoryanova, Vasil Georgiev, Vladislav Todorov, Georgi Tenev... The article concludes with a synthesis of the genre specificity and thematic diversity of Bulgarian dystopian literature of the early 21st century.
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Keywords
satire, novel, dystopia, genre literature