Аннотация
The paper explores the issues of growing up in specific circumstances in Croa-
tia in the first half of the 1990s − significantly those determined by the collapse
of Yugoslavia, the war in newly formed Croatia and the neighbouring state of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the large number of refugees and exiles
from war-torn areas − as the thematic axis of a relevant number of contempo-
rary Croatian novels. The study focuses on five novels: Underground Barbie [Sloboština Barbie, 2008] by Maša Kolanović; The Hotel Tito [Hotel Zagorje, 2010] by Ivana Simić Bodrožić; In Late Summer [U kasno ljeto, 2022] by Magdalena Blažević, Cabbage Leafing [Listanje kupusa, 2023] by Igor Beleš; and The Croat Factory [Tvornica Hrvata, 2023] by Nebojša Lujanović. These novels were not initially conceived as childrenʼs or young adult novels but function as a kind of mediation space between childrenʼs literature and adult literature (so-called crossover literature) due to certain characteristics – child protagonists, issues related to growing up, the context of the peer group, the relation between the world of youth and the world of adults, the questioning of associated socio-psychological phenomena (wartime trauma, hatred, violence, exclusion, political and economic transition, gender and class deprivation, etc.). The latter is confirmed by the inclusion of some of them in primary or secondary school lists of required reading (The Hotel Tito by Ivana Bodrožić). Through analytical examination of the motifs, themates, and concepts, and worldviews present in the selected novels, we observe the representation of growing up in a collision with the semantic, narrative, linguistic and stylistic aspects of their structure and establish the typology of several different models of growing up in the modern Croatian novel. Special attention is paid to the dimension of autobiographism generated through the relationship of instances of author, narrator, and character, whereby the autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical nature of all novels is observed as their common structural feature. Also, in all the novels analysed here, war becomes a kind of platform for accelerated maturation and, at the same time, a site of implicit social criticism.
