The Novel Danuncijada – The Forerunner of the Postmodern Historical Novel (A Review on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Birth of Viktor Car Emin)

Abstract

This text was written on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Viktor Car Emin (1870 – 1963) and refers to the author’s most mature work, the novel Dannunziade (1946). Since Šenoa’s teleological conception of the historical novel was replaced in Car’s novel by the non-teleological one, the narrator introduces irony, by which history is denied as a logical sequence. Through carnivalisation, the grotesque character of the historical person as an antihero and the quotation dialogue with tradition, in his Dannunziade Car was close to the later postmodern poetics of the historical novel, therefore some of his literary procedures are recognisable in some authors’ historical novels such as Fabrio, Kušan and Brešan.