History and identity in the Balkan novel

The boundary between the disciplines of literature and history has come into question in contemporary theory. This is due to the problematizing of history through the postmodernist and the new historicist perspectives. In this respect, history is considered to be intersecting with literature on the grounds that they are both textual constructs and are observed to bear similar narrative techniques. Accordingly, within the scope of this study it will be seen that the author's using historical facts and events or referring to past in his work depends on motivation which may vary from writing allusively to building a connection between past and present. With regard to this, the works that will be discussed in this thesis are The Bridge on the Drina and The Damned Yard by Ivo Andric; The Siege and The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare. These works will be discussed with respect to some particularities; the political atmosphere of the times they are written in, their historical aspects, the reason of using such historical facts. They will also be analysed with regards to bridge and castle or wall metaphors. As their narration is mainly based on 'history', theoretically it becomes a necessity to analyse them not from the perspective of 'traditional historical novel', since they are not considered as such, but through the lens of mostly postmodernism and in particular via the approach of historiographic metafiction.