BULGARIAN LITERATURE OF THE TRANSITION: THE DISCUSSION OF THE NOVEL. THE NOVEL SUMMIT IN A NATIONAL ЕPIC СONTEXT

Abstract

This article is part of a larger study of the origins and poetics of the novel genre, in particular its autochthonous accumulations in Bulgarian literature. Here the focus is on the specificity of the novel in the era of Transition (after 1989 until today). The historical stage of Transition itself is divided into two sub-periods: the decade of the 1990s, dominated by poetry, and after 2000, when the novel emerged in a leading position. Two main theses are launched. The first concerns the national-epic representativeness of the genre (the expectation of the “great” social novel that would express the “spirit of the age”), stating and arguing the thesis that the novel after 2000 performs quasi-epic functions (in Hegel’s formulation of the novel as a modern, bourgeois epic), typologically similar – but also opposite! – to certain national-ideological commitments in the postmodern poetry of the 1990s. A second, partially affected thesis is how the novel after 2000 continues and at the same time overturns, rearticulates in its own genre-discursive language some basic macrometaphors in the poetry of the 1990s.