David Norris

My research is focused on literary and cultural studies in former Yugoslavia and its successor states. This book, Haunted Serbia, concerns Serbian literature published since 1980, particularly the use of ghosts and other uncanny motifs to represent times of instability and transition. Haunting is what happens when the past is disturbed and the victims of history's violence are made to live again. Serbian writers in the 1980s exhume the ghosts of the past as they recall the fading memories of atrocities committed in the Second World War, often challenging the official narrative of Partisan heroes creating a new social and political order under the leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, as Yugoslavia melts away, Serbian literary prose is haunted again by grotesque monsters of war rising to the surface in a new conflict. The book closes with a fresh wave of violence generating more fantastic events in stories about NATO's air attack in 1999.