Projects
Bulgarian Literature in the first decade of the twentieth century is characterized by a specific “anthologization” - a result of the synchronous processes of internal canonization (the constitution of a national literature) and external canonization (the incorporation into world literature). In the post-communist period of the 1990s, prominent historical anthologies functioned in turn as a literary-historical matrix for aesthetic reorientation.
The eminent popularity in both Bulgarian modernism and postmodernism of the production of anthologies calls for comparative analysis. The research project analyzes a range of literary anthological production including such diverse forms as compilations of foreign poetry, collections of dedication poems or fictitious anthologies consisting solely of literary mystifications.
Theoretically, the project positions itself in the framework of post-colonial genre theory, which allows a shift of focus in comparative Balkan studies from the discursive surfaces of (self)stigmatization to the underlying structures of creative, subversive genre modification, represented in ideal form in the fictitious anthologies of (post)modern Bulgarian literature.