The anti-homeland (Anti-Heimatroman) novel is a literary genre which appeared during the sixties and seventies in Austria and there became very popular. Lierary critics are not in full agreement regarding the name and the corpus of texts belonging to the genere. Some propound the thesis about a radical anti-homeland novel and draw a sharp distinction between this genere and the traditional homeland novel (Heimatroman). As a consequence, when choosing the works which they subsume under this genre they do not adhere to the most important genric constants which characterize homeland literature. This is patrticularly relevant to the village-agrarian space as the setting of the plot. Die second approach is based on the thesis upholding the continuity of the literary genre of the homeland novel and as the basis of explaining the genre uses Rossbacher's typology of the homeland novel. This means that only those works which contain a minimum of generic constants can be numbered among transformed homeland novels which accordingly negates the anti-homeland novel as a distinctive genre. From a comparison of these two theses it can be concluded that the appelation antihomeland novel is a more appropriate term because it expresses in a much better way the radicalism of the changes undergone by the traditional homeland novel during the two decades under consideration while at the same time it does not negate the fact that the genre is a continuator of the homeland novel tradition.
