Types of fear, ethics and aesthetics of terror, and the politics of emotions in The Album of Female Prisoners by Milutin A. Popovic
Authors: Tomic Svetlana 
Published: February 2021

Eventhough the number of neurosience studies has grown from the late 20th
century, the topic of fear in Serbian literature of the second half of the
19th century has rarely been separately researched. For this analisys, the
author has chosen an unusual book in which, unlikely to Serbian novels of
the time, fear was often described. It is the first book of the stories
about Serbian female convicts of the 19th century The Album of the Women?s
Ward of Prison in Pozarevac with Statistics (1898) by Milutin A. Popovic.
Contrary to some Serbian, Swedish (1861) and American (1886) albuma of the
time, Popovic narrated crimes and sometimes wrote confessions derived
directly from the female prisoners. The purpose of this paper is to analyse
fear, conditioned by time and space, its vocal, facial and body expressions,
as well as personal reactions. In this interdisciplanary research the author
has integrated perspectives and methods from the Theory of Literature and
Affective Narratology, Comparative Literature, History of Serbian Society
and Literature, Psychology, Political Psychology, Philosophy and to some
extent Linguistics (Cognitive Semantics). It is argued that the author's
insistence on truth was the part of terrorethics, of causing fear and shock.
It establishes the triumph of truth without beautifying, calling for
sensibility, compassion and responsibility, in order to improve society. The
results of the investigation show that in Album fear is presented as a
complex emotion. It appears as an act of defense, but also as a form of
manipulation. Fear is often connected to women and it turned to courage. The
fear of death and the fear of a dead human body are the most frequently
described fears. The author also described gender-specific fear of
pregnancy, abortion, and rape. The Album breaks stereotypes of the past
Serbian society and reveals different cases of women?s political resistance
and sexual freedom. In the Album, fear is rarely vocally expressed, rather
it manifests through different bodily symptoms, their intensity and
spectrum. In describing one of the cruelest crimes, the author included
humor as a mean of defense and fear control. Emotional geography reveals a
paradox: a home is a place of terror and life threat, while a prison emerges
as an area of joy and security. Moreover, the book describes two key
generators of the politics of emotions. One is made by the systematic
violence of a patriarcharchal society toward women, and the other one by
inadequate institutions which ignore serious social problems. The language
of fear, shock, horror, provocation and perversion and the aesthetics of the
genre is interpreted as a part of the author's efforts for readers to feel
terror of psycho-physiological mechanisms of pain, and to make new
connections with the society and its culture. The creation of a complex and
multimedia genre of the album is in accordance with the author's multuple
efforts to deconstruct the layers of real life and its different dangers,
calling for counteractions, and showing the tragic link between inhumane and
unordered society.