The 21st century is said to be one of the most peaceful times in history, yet the desire to fight and conquer that has constituted a prominent part of human nature since the beginnings of humanity is still very much present. It is therefore not surprising that Aleksandar Hemon and Josip Novakovich, two writers whose works have been analysed in this Master's thesis, have chosen to write about war. Hemon and Novakovich are two writers that from Bosnia and Croatia, respectively, and have emigrated to the United States and Canada during the war in the Balkans in the 1990s. In their works, they use irony and humour as a sort of coping mechanism to distance themselves from the atrocities of the war they are describing or to provide the reader with a momentary sense of relief, daring them to laugh during the most inappropriate moments. The first part of this Master’s thesis is dedicated to the concept of irony and its principal characteristics, while the second part deals with the analysis of concrete examples found in six selected works written by these authors. In this way, a comparison was made between Hemon and Novakovich, which resulted in the identification of some common themes, such as war and the accompanying atrocities, emigration and feeling out of place in a new country, and American involvement in the war in the Balkans in the 1990s.
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