Title: Social Criticism in Contemporary Croatian Novels

Founder: Croatian Science Foundation

Legal entity: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka

Duration: 12/01/2026 – 11/01/2029

Summary:

The project will focus on the extent to which the contemporary Croatian novel is socially critical, how it expresses social criticism, and which social issues it most frequently critiques.

Recognizing that a literary text is both a self-sufficient aesthetic entity and a specific form of social practice, the research within this project starts from the hypothesis that the contemporary Croatian novel critically examines, in an artistically relevant manner, not only various social issues and taboos—such as social inequality and injustice, political corruption, ideological manipulation, and transgenerational trauma—but also the structures and mechanisms that create social positions and values. The second core hypothesis is that the socially critical themes present in contemporary Croatian novels also appear in the works of authors from neighbouring, culturally and linguistically related post-Yugoslav countries.

To test these hypotheses, the primary objectives of this research project will be the analysis and interpretation of the different forms and methods of addressing socially critical themes in contemporary Croatian and post-Yugoslav novels based on contemporary literary and cultural theories that expose systems of power and discursive practices influencing the production and reproduction of unequal power relations between social classes, genders, ethnic, racial, and other groups. The motivation behind this planned research is the belief that social criticism is a significant aspect of the selected corpus and deserves more systematic and extensive study, which has been lacking so far.

IIn this sense, the expected outcomes of the project proposal (scientific papers, conference lectures and a bibliographicthematic database on the covered corpus) aim to contribute to this area of Croatian and Slavic literary studies.