Exploring the crisis motif in contemporary German-speaking, English-speaking, and Croatian literature—a digital and interdisciplinary approach

Abstract This article presents preliminary findings of the research project UIP-2020-02-3695 Analysis of Systems in Crisis and of New Consciousness in 21st Ct. Literature that is being financially supported by the Croatian Science Foundation. At the level of scientific contribution, the research consolidates theoretical insights into the phenomenon of permanent crisis of the modern society that is being projected through literature. This article provides an insight into some preliminary findings of the project regarding an overview of explicit representations of crises of sociocultural systems in contemporary German, English, and Croatian novels and plays with the aim of proving the hypothesis that these texts portray characters whose attitude towards systems in crisis is predominantly subversive, with outcomes that in most cases do not result in positive crisis resolution. The methodology used in the research is corpus-based and mixed, comprising a combination of quantitative and qualitative as well as thematic analyses, conducted with the support of digital tools.