Images of (Un)Respectability and the Imagining of the Nation in Vladovit Zorec’s Satire "Čudnovate diple [The Marvellous Flute]"

Abstract

The paper analyses discursive construction of images of respectability and how their role in the development of natio­nal identity is presented in the verse satire Čudnovate diple [The Marvellous Flute] by the 19th-century Croatian writer Vladovit Zorec. In terms of its stylistic formation, this is a heterogeneous work. Inter alia, the satire’s author forms discourse strategies of Croatian Romanticism in the Revival period aimed at promoting national integration, and formulates political and ideological concepts of the Illyrian movement. He discursively forms the na­tional community, describing various aspects of conviviality and entertainment practices, the family and the marital relationship, (un)desirable feminine and masculine roles and sexual behaviour. His satirical rhetoric strategies play the role of establishing and supervising the border between the respectable, ‘normal’, and the unrespectable, ‘abnormal’. The paper shows that the satire’s ideal of respectability is often formed by presenting the unrespe­ctable ‘otherness' and condemning the infringement of social and moral norms. This is done in order to potentially discipline, and raise national awareness of, various transgressive figures that the author addresses in the text (spouses, parents, youth).