Hrvatski fantastičari: Jedna književna generacija

The main theme – a synchronic description of the poetics of a specific generation of Croatian writers who introduced elements of the fantastic, ironic, metafictional and postmodern approach to Croatian literature, often through a short story. Pavičić calls them “fantasists” not in the sense of classical fantasy (as with Todorov), but as a generation that uses the fantastic as a strategy for criticizing reality, irony and playing with literary conventions in socialist Yugoslavia. Key authors of the generation that Pavičić discusses or implies: Goran Tribuson, Pavao Pavličić, Stjepan Čuić, Damir Miloš, Ivan Babić, but also a wider circle of “young prose” of the 1970s (fantasists as a subgroup). The book is academic, but lucid and accessible – it has been praised as one of the most important analyses of contemporary Croatian literature of the 1990s/2000s (e.g. Booksa calls it “one of the most lucid books in contemporary literature”). Not a popular synthesis, but an in-depth study for students and researchers, with an emphasis on short story theory, postmodernism, and fantasy.