The Analytic of Finitude in the Poetics of Bojić’s Drama Autumn of the King Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover Monash University, Australia Abstract: Tis paper examines the poetics of Bojić’s play Autumn of the King, posing the question of genre of the “historical drama” in a theoretical context and looking at the function of the historical realia of the play in aesthetic terms, as a means of stylization of the historical themes and characters. By analyzing the language of the play as a vehicle for expressive, afective contents, the conclusion is reached that the play is a staging of the structure of language as fnitude, and an embodiment of metaphor as a living performance. Te linguistic analysis is informed by psychoanalytic and post-structural theories of desire, transgression, the gaze, and fnitude. Finally, the plot of the play, centring on the Wagnerian love-death motif of modernism, is seen as the ultimate key to the poetics of Bojić’s lyrical drama of the fn-de-siècle, which makes Bojić an innovator of the Serbian poetics of modernism. Keywords: “historical drama,” Wagnerian lyrical drama, stylization, gaze, fnitude, desire and language, love-death Introduction: Cultural Background of Bojić’s Drama Milutin Bojić (1892–1917) belonged to the younger generation of Serbian poets who emerged in Serbian literature as fully formed post-Parnassians on the eve of World War I. Born in the same year as the other two giants of Yugoslav modernism— Miloš Crnjanski and Ivo Andrić—Bojić would have taken his place alongside them as the greatest lyrical talent in Serbian literature between the two wars, but for his premature death from pneumonia while serving at the Tessalonica Front. His biography, though short, is replete with literary facts, which situate him as a poet frmly in the symbolist aesthetics of his time. Bojić was drawn to the dramatic poetic genre. By the end of his short life, he had to his name a considerable repertoire of lyrical dramatic texts. Of the fve dramas he Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 31: 73–104, 2020.