We “were neither Croatians, nor Illyrians nor Slavs, but ‘imperial royal frontiersman’”. On the phenomenon of the border in August Šenoa and Miroslav Krleža

Abstract

Departing from the thesis that literary texts, in addition to their capacity to provide description, also demonstrate potential for construing reality, this paper focuses on the selected narratives, or essayistic and poetological texts written by the canonical Croatian authors August Šenoa and Miroslav Krleža. The paper focuses on the demonstration and literary representation of various border phenomena in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Šenoa) and their gradual change in the post-imperial age following the Great War (Krleža). By challenging the imperial narrative about the Military Frontier, the image of the Ottomans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as the associated national and homogenizing discourses infused by the processes of Othering, the article analyses a number of variations in the understanding of the border and their ideological implications with special regard to the thesis that borders are construed as impossible endeavours aiming to separate the Self from the Other.