War Poetry and the Visual Culture of War – the Case of the Illustrated War Chronicle (Belgrade)

Abstract

In 1912, during the First Balkan War, armies of Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria clashed against the Turkish forces in an attempt to bring about the final resolution of the Ottoman presence in the Balkans. At the time, numerous Serbian periodicals continually brought news from the battlefield in order to inform and to politically engage the readership in Serbia; there were, however, several journals that should be considered specifically as war periodicals – the Illustrated War Chronicle (Belgrade), the Illustrated War Chronicle (Novi Sad), the Balkan War in Image and Word (Belgrade) and the Illustrated Balkan (Belgrade).
This paper focuses on the Illustrated War Chronicle – the most “war-centred” publication, published in Belgrade – with the aim of exploring its different strands in representing the male body as one of the main loci of trauma and injury in the war propaganda discourse. The exploration of the male body motif is based on the following materials: poems (as literary texts) and different visual materials (photographs and reproductions). The aim of the article is to establish correspondences between the male body imagery in the poems and visual materials and to determine to what extent these were employed as an effective and powerful tool of wartime media propaganda.