Censorship in Albania during the dictatorial regime: exclusion of great authors from textbooks of literary history

Author(s)

Abstract
As it did with every field of life, the installation of the communist dictatorship in Albania put literature under ideological control, making the path that writers needed to follow mandatory. Whoever opposed it, paid with his/her life, or was punished politically along with his/her work, being excluded from the textbooks of literary history. Important names, such as Gjergj Fishta, Ernest Koliqi, Faik Konica, Zef Skiroi, etc., remained outside of the history of literature throughout the communist period, being mentioned only briefly, along with labels such as “traitor”, “collaborationist”, “enemy”, “collaborator of fascism”. Their work did not become part of the study curricula in compulsory or higher education in the country, thus destroying the hierarchy of values ​​and dividing literature into isolated islands that did not communicate with each other. In this paper, we will see how these important figures of Albanian literature were reflected in the two official textbooks of the history of literature (1959, 1983) and a text (proof sheets of 1968), which is exactly because it included chapters about the excluded authors, that it was banned from publication after being sent to the printing house.

Keywords
dictatorship, censorship, exclusion, literary history, sentencing, banned writers

Cite this paper
Brunilda Prifti, Censorship in Albania during the dictatorial regime: exclusion of great authors from textbooks of literary history , SCIREA Journal of Sociology. Volume 5, Issue 4, August 2021 | PP. 259-265. 10.54647/sociology84594

References