1 Commonly-cited examples of the modernist approach include Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), E.J. Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Regarding Eastern Europe, add Rogers Brubaker’s Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Miroslav Hroch’s Social Conditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
2 Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998) 159–165. Perennialists include John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982; Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Anthony D. Smith in his many books and articles.
3 Nenad Dimitrijević, “Words and Death: Serbian Nationalist Intellectuals,” in Andras Bozoki, ed., Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999) 123
4 Eric Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1999) 11.
5 Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) 150.
6 Tim Judah’s The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). For more extensive comment, see Nick Miller, “Beyond Journalism,” in East European Politics and Societies v. 13, no. 3 (Fall 1999) 609.
7 Branimir Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (New York: New York University Press, 1999). I reviewed this book for H-Net in 1999 (http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=1923926098751).
8 Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Weitz’s first hardcover edition broadly and lengthily asserted that the brutal passages of The Mountain Wreath drew their force from the Kosovo cycle; the problem is that the Kosovo cycle is not mentioned in The Mountain Wreath; nor is the Kosovo cycle brutal. This sort of misuse of evidence that he apparently had not actually read was surprising is a book of its stature, but the fact that no expert on Serbian history read it (according to the acknowledgments) before publication was depressingly telling. Weitz addressed the problem in the paperback edition of the book.
9 Svetislav Basara, Looney Tunes: Manično-paranoična istorija srpske književnosti u periodu od 1979.–1990. godine (Beograd: Dereta: 1997).
10 As was the case with a petition issued by a group of Serbian intellectuals in 1986 bemoaning the fate of the Serbs of Kosovo; one prominent victim of Albanian excesses was memorialized as the new mother of the Jugovićes, another as the new Deacon Avakum.
11 Hobsbawm once allowed that Serbia was an exception to the modernist rule. See Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 75–76.
12 “…to focus on nationness not as substance but as institutionalized form; not as collectivity but as practical category; not as entity but as contingent event.” Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 16.
13 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.
14 Andrew Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 2.
15 Wachtel, Making a Nation, 3. I make the same point regarding nineteenthcentury Serbian, Croatian, and Yugoslav nationalisms in Between Nation and State: Serbian Politics in Croatia before the First World War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997) pp. 30–33.
16 Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Hanover, NH: The University Press of New England, 2000) 63.
17 Smith, The Nation in History, 64.
18 Dragović Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation,’ 206.
19 Mirko Kovač, “Izmedju čoveka i Mesije,” Naša borba (Belgrade) October 12–13, 1996).
20 “Ne sme proliti nijedna kap krvi!,” Naša borba (Belgrade) November 24, 1996).
21 David Albahari, Mrak (Belgrade: Narodna knjiga/Alfa, 1997); Basara, Looney Tunes.
22 Dobrica Ćosić, Za preporod Srbije sa novim ljudima u novom društvu (Belgrade: Naš Dom, 1999) 9–10.