The thesis tries to establish the principal characteristics of the Serbian novel in the period after the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in 1991, otherwise known as the period of transition. By analysing selected authors and their works, we address the problem on two distinct levels, namely, how the breakup affected the existing authors and their poetics, and what are the properties of poetics pertaining to those authors who commenced writing precisely in the 1990s. The overview of historical development and literary context of the second half of the 20th century serves as the incipient point for the discussion on contemporary Serbian novel, which is broadly characterized by the pluralism of poetic models and remnants of bygone literary flows. Currently, it is impossible to determine the dominant literary flow, albeit we can observe the experience of postmodernism and corresponding emblematic narrative techniques in the majority of cases. Thus, authors either retreat into the intimate sphere of a kind of "modernism after postmodernism" or resort to a ludic interplay of narrative techniques, whilst sharing the lucid social critique as a result of tumultuous developments on the social-political level.
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