Systems of literature outside their matrix: framing unstable émigré and stable 'voluntary exile' models of national literature

Vinko Brešić defined the essential difference between émigré and exile literature in his article Hrvatska emigratska književnost (1945-1990) (Croatian Émigré Literature [1945-1990]). This paper, which is based on the hypotheses of Brešić and Grubišić (1991), as well as some of my articles written in 195 and 1998, attempts to work out the literary models of unstable groups of émigré literature, affirming the difference between the émigré (migrant), the ethnic (minority) and, finally, the third group of what I call the 'voluntary' exile model. In this sense, this paper deals with the types of 'dislocatedness' in the corpus of émigré literature, and the models of their incorporation/exclusion in the matrix of Croatian literature and the adopted literary framework (in this case, Australian literature). Here I use two recently published novels as examples that illustrate some of the border phenomena in the context of the above model The first is the fictitious autobiographical novel Mojmir (1999), written by Ivana Bačić Serdarević, which partly fits into the émigré model. The second is Branka Čubrilo's 'unhistorically' motivated family chronicle, Male laži, velike laži (Small Lies, Big Lies, 2001), which belongs to 'voluntary' exile literature, and thus belongs more to Croatian literature proper than to émigré literature.. Both authors live in Sydney, but the model of their incorporation/exclusion into the two aforesaid bodies of literature are essentially different. On the basis of an analysis of these novels and their relation to the sources that condition them (the displaced environment), towards the end of this paper I try to determine their relation to the aforesaid bodies of literature which the novels, in a certain sense, are supposed to distinguish from one another.