Grdoba napretka. Degeneracija, kultura normalizacije i hrvatska književnost na prijelazu iz 19. u 20. stoljeće
The ugliness of progress. Degeneration, the culture of normalization and Croatian literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries

Summary/Abstract: The thesis of the paper is that the Croatian bourgeois culture in the 19th century originates as the culture of normalization that strives to restrain, by its mechanisms of discipline such as psychiatry, the different forms of social abnormalities. At the same time, those mechanisms rely on the theory of degeneration that becomes an important topic of the Croatian literature of that time. First of all, the paper defines the range of connection between the theory of degeneration and Croatian modern literature. After that, the paper shows to what extent the former psychiatry and medicine themselves rely on the theory of degeneration. Finally, with the analysis of the novel Tito Dorčić, the paper confirms the complexity of the connections between the Croatian culture of the normalization in the 19th century and the fin de siècle literature that reflects and problematizes important social and cultural contradictions.

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