Elements of romantic friendship are present in many nineteenth-century literary works, but at the turn of the century the perception of romantic friendship changed due to the infiltration of sexology into the secular sphere. An analysis of Tavčar’s novella Soror Pia and Marica Nadlišek Bartol’s novel Fatamorgana, both written at the turn of the century, shows the parallel persistence of two different perspectives on romantic friendship; namely, a positive traditional one and a new one that portrays romantic friendship through either psychopathological discourse or new forms of identity.
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