As a literary phenomenon, mannerism has often been the subject of contradictory approaches in scientific literature discussions. On the one hand, it has been historically observed as a period whose duration is limited to the time between the late Renaissance and Baroque while on the other hand, in the typological approach, it is defined as a style that is recursive and occurs frequently in certain "anticlastic" literary periods as a reaction to "classic"periods. This approach was introduced by E. R. Curtius and his view that mannerism is the constant of European literature is somewhat taken over by Pavao Pavličić, but does not exclude viewing mannerism as a set of stylistic procedures that occur in a certain period of Croatian literature. Pavličić examines the examples of mannerist approaches in an interpretative framework based on three aspects of manneyristical poetics - the problematization of relations with tradition, the relationship between literature and reality and the relation of literature to oneself, that is, autothematicity. The central part of this paper is devoted to the presentation of Pavličić's theoretical approach to the poetics of mannerism and to the examination of manneristic tendencies in his novels Evening Act (1981) and the Coral Gate (1990), while the analysis of his literary texts was conducted on the basis of an interpretative framework introduced in his Poetics of Mannerism (1988). The common feature of the aforementioned novels in the context of Pavličić's interpretation of mannerism is to successfully lead the dialogue incorporating tradition by actualizing, through citations or allusions, the work of older Croatian literature while the introducing fantasies is used as an opportunity to discuss relations according to social reality given the significance that literature has within it.