Daily life and crisis in literary journals. A multiperspective reading of diaries written during the Second World War

This project investigates which context- and form-related characteristics and which literary and anthropological functions of the diary are influenced by the historical and local crisis circumstances of war and occupation. Thus, it examines if the specific historical situation of the Second World War leads to changes in the genre of the journal and its functions. The proposed study is divided into two parts that are closely related. The first part (the PhD project) starts with listing the characteristics of diaries. Than comes a detailed reading of the ways in which diaries of canonized writers portray the reality of daily life in urban environments during the Second World War. Finally, the changes in daily writing practices of the authors being in a crisis situation will be investigated and connected to the genre features of the journal in terms of content, form and function. In the second (interdisciplinary) part of the research the genre of literary diaries is contrasted with non-literary diaries and compared with German literary diaries in order to find out the specific literary and translocal chararacteristics and functions of the journal.