Balkan worlds: Community, space and revolutionary internationalism on the Yugoslav literary left, 1870-193

Through an intellectual history of the literary left of interwar Yugoslavia, this dissertation traces the rise and fall of the nineteenth century idea of a Balkan Socialist Federation. It argues that, drawing from this intellectual tradition, writers on the interwar left in Yugoslavia used literature to reimagine the space of South East Europe and negotiate broader concerns with international revolution, local self-determination and cultural development, posed by the rapid integration of this region into global political and economic structures.;The first chapter (1870-1914) traces the reception of the communist idea to the Balkans in the late nineteenth century, arguing that theorists such as Svetozar Markovic and Dimitrije Tucovic developed the vision of a Balkan Socialist Federation to articulate anti-colonial demands for regional self-determination. The chapter argues that this idea of a Balkan Federation shaped the local reception of the communist idea, drawing from its intellectual reservoirs new visions of community that rejected the homogenizing tendencies of nationalism and re-imagined the geographies of Europe and the Balkans. The second chapter (1918-1926) follows the fate of Balkan Federalism among the post-war radical avant-gardes, exploring their efforts at re-envisioning the space of their region in line with revolutionary communist and radical aesthetic practices. Chapter three (1928-1934) recounts the emergence of the Yugoslav social literature movement during the 6 January Dictatorship and argues that the movement's linguistic politics and strategies of cultural development undermined ideas of Balkan community.;The idea of a distinctly Balkan space, however, was kept alive by certain intellectuals on the literary left of Yugoslavia and chapter four offers a close study of the work of the Croatian modernist Miroslav Krleza and his attempt to reimagine the space of south east Europe through the framework of the communist idea. It undertakes a close reading of Krleza's first novel, The return of Philip Latinowicz, to show how the author's construction of the imagined space of 'Pannonia' and his use of an abject aesthetics operated according to a political-economic logic of community at odds with that of nationalism.;Chapter five (1934-1938) continues to trace the erosion of ideas of Balkan community among the Yugoslav literary left. It concerns the rise of fascism and the formation of the popular front, and argues that during this period leftist writers in Yugoslavia undertook a rapprochement with Europe, reimagining their own region as part of a wider European space. As writers sought to adapt the communist idea to the new strategic priorities of the popular front, leftist intellectuals sought to appropriate popular and national histories to use against rising fascist movements. In initiating this leftist appropriation of the past, they cast themselves as defenders and successors of a distinctly European history of progress, enlightenment and democracy.;The dissertation makes three broader contributions to the literature in the field of European history. First, it challenges existing scholarly assumptions regarding the hegemony of nationalism, and instead points to different forms of imagined communities grounded in alternative logics of belonging. Second, by showing how writers on Europe's periphery engaged with the fraught question of belonging to or escaping from a wider European space it seeks to decenter Europe as the sole political and cultural horizon for the Balkans. Finally, it offers an intellectual history of communism in Eastern Europe that suspends the teleological focus on the post-war socialist regimes and instead addresses the multiplicity of visions, aspirations and perspectives contained within communist thought during the interwar period.