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In the play Romeo and Juliet, which has become the synonym for the love tragedy, death is represented as the ultimate, all-consuming, and almost nihilistic power that cannot be conquered even by the most pure and passionate love. But, its devastating effect is reduced by the strong, transcendent, and the idealistic vision of love of the two young creatures who became immortal as the materialistic golden monuments, due to the power of the eternal art and the word of Shakespeare. Presenting it in the traditional frame of the Dance of Death and memento mori iconography, Shakespeare is showing us the different aspects of the Renaissance thought of death. The older generation sees it as the natural progression of life that cannot and must not stop everyday activities, but the younger hopes to find in death the salvation and escape from the insupportable and pragmatic world. Although there are religiously guided thoughts about life after death in the play, secular statements about death as a flight from the unbearable reality and the cure for the impossible love are more present. Even suicide is not conventionally represented as the sinful and devilish enterprise that must be condemned, but as the sacrifice and radical attempt to protect and preserve love. Shakespeare makes his lovers the owners of death, despite the rigid patriarchal effort to control both life and its opposite force. Love of Romeo and Juliet thus becomes victorious in death.

Although writers of the English Restoration tragedy were not able to continue the path of the magnificent Renaissance tragedy and to become the worthy heirs of Shakespeare, they were experimenting with the verse and themes leaving a few impressive tragic scenes. Therefore, the heroic tragedy, as a dramatic kind, did not achieve an enviable aesthetic value. On the other hand, writers of comedies have managed to adjust the traditional elements to the new literary trends and to the atmosphere of the epoch. They have created a comedy of character and humor with an appropriate and realistic prose dialogue full of wit and refined language which was the best media for depicting cheerful and immoral aristocratic life of that time. Preserving and highlighting these dramatic elements, the dramatists of the Restoration have influenced the successors of a typical British comedy that will come to life again, in its true and pure comic form, in the works of Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde.

The central plot of Fletcher and Shakespeare's play The Two Noble Kinsmen derives from Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, so it could be interpreted through the theory of intertextuality and transtextuality. The prototext of these literary works is identical, but it has been modified over the centuries. It has changed from a mythological story into a universal symbol of love, friendship, authority, honor, and death. Apart from the permutation of texts by different authors, The Two Noble Kinsmen is also a curious collection of Shakespeare's earlier works, despite the frequent contestation of his contribution to this play. Such self-citation is an interesting phenomenon, especially if we consider the fact that this play is Shakespeare's last work and not The Tempest, as traditionally stated in literary histories. Therefore, this paper aims to determine the similarities and differences between Chaucer's famous story and Fletcher and Shakespeare's play, to point out the degree of intertextuality in it, and to highlight the original dramatic episodes and characters, their function, meaning, and significance. With the assumption that Fletcher and Shakespeare intentionally and purposefully chose the mode of adaptation and transformation of the famous Chaucer's text, the obtained results indicate that certain elements were modified due to the requirements of the dramatic form and its theatrical function, but also for commercial and socio-political reasons. The transposition of the well-known ancient story into Renaissance England, with new episodes and characters in the subplot, offers a different and somewhat subversive picture of conventional social norms and relations.

The Great War triggered the establishment of the Serbian literary avant-garde, which was determined against tradition, history, and conventional aesthetics. With a completely new expression, writers of the literary avant-garde articulated the change of consciousness about the world, metamorphosis of the narrative structure of the text, and the modernization of the novelistic form. In the context of the European literature, as well as the Anglo-American, the return of the soldiers from the war was the prominent topic in the works of the so-called 'Lost generation' (Gertrude Stein, E. Hemingway and S. Fitzgerald). The themes of war also occupied writers such as W. Faulkner, T. Wolfe and H. Miller. The greatest poet of the Serbian literature between the two world wars, Miloš Crnjanski, presented the suprahistorical projection of the war and considered the return of the soldiers to be the saddest event in a man's life. The first Serbian modern, lyrical novel, 'Journal of Čarnojević' (Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću), gives a metaphysical picture of history and intimately understood picture of the wartime world, nation and being. This paper follows Crnjanski's views on history and war through the main character, Petar Rajić, and his counterpart of sorts, Čarnojević. Poetics of this modernistic text rests on the fictionalization of fact, metaphorization of war and aestheticization of history. As a resigned pacifist and disappointed melancholic, Rajić perceives the war completely anti-traditionally in comparison to a hero of a classical history novel. Visualization of events and the relativization of war and chronotope in the lyrical discourse of Miloš Crnjanski allow history to disperse into poetry, into the essence of being and the ontological plane of this metahistorical novel.