Mimicry Games, or The Creation of the Literary Canon as Art: Fictitious Anthologies in (Post)Modern Bulgarian Literature
Mimicry Games, or The Creation of the Literary Canon as Art: Fictitious Anthologies in (Post)Modern Bulgarian Literature

Summary/Abstract: I assume that the astounding popularity of the otherwise somewhat ‘dry’ meta-genre of the anthology in Bulgarian literature is due to the specific dynamics of the creation of a literary canon. The lack – real or imagined – of a national literary heritage, a consequence of centuries of foreign, ‘Ottoman’, ‘Western’ or ‘Soviet’ domination, led to a characteristic instability of the Bulgarian canon. As a consequence, discussions on its (im-)possibilities flared up regularly in the literary community and ‘foreign’ models were imported in order to ‘fill the gaps’ (see Gesemann, 1989; K’osev, 1998; Lauer, 1989; Tihanov, 1998: 150). The macro-genre of the anthology (and the chrestomathy) as collections of model texts is at the same time effect and agent of such canonization processes; these anthologies reflect an established canon and help to shape and reproduce it (Trendafilov, 1998)...

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