New Historicism and Cultural Materialism in Serbian Literary Thought

Abstract

In this paper, we have tried to outline the outcomes of the presence and influence of new historicism and cultural materialism on Serbian literary thought in the last decades of the XX and first decades of the XXI century. In order to provide a pertinent review, it was first necessary to describe and characterize the intellectual atmosphere in the Serbian theory of literature and literary criticism in the last quarter of the past century, as well as to point out the aspects of academic adoption of the neopositivist methodology. The metacritical terms of literary critic historians Predrag Palavestra and Milan Radulović served as conceptual guides in this case, as did the theoretical conception of the aspects of historical analysis by Svetozar Petrović, which dates from the 1980s. In the central part of the paper we focused on the presentation of texts by British and American cultural historians, which have been translated in literary magazines with introductions by local authors. In this editorial we present an overview of the basic assumptions of literary theorists in the polyphonic system of culture. We also briefly comment on Steven Greenblatt’s monographs Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and Self-design in the Renaissance. In parallel, we shed light on studies that discuss more extensively the theoretical starting points and implications of these critical schools. We have also examined to what extent and in what way the interpretative assumptions of new historians and cultural materialists were reflected in the interpretation of Serbian literature, and what their implications for domestic literary (self)design are.