B. Wongar's Literary Work and Life from an Ethnological and Anthropological Perspective

Abstract

This paper looks at the (auto)biography and literary work of an Australian writer of Serbian descent, B. Wongar/Sreten Božić, viewed from the perspective of ethnology and anthropology. His work is well known to local scholars of literary and cultural studies: for them, Wongar's complex and polysemous oeuvre has long since become a vibrant topic of interpretation and dialogue. An attempt is made here to show how and why this prolific, award-winning and world-renowned author has become a controversial phenomenon in Australian literature. Such a concise retrospective is needed so that readers outside the humanities can gain at least partial insight. The main aim is to highlight those topics in Wongar's fiction and documentary writing that are important from the standpoint of sociocultural anthropology and anthropology of literature: the characteristics of the migrant position and experiences of the dissident writer as a social actor, and the ethnographic-folkloric motivation of the writer's oeuvre.