Alberto Fortis i hrvatska književnost
Alberto Fortis and the Croatian Literature

Summary/Abstract: This study addresses the way in which Alberto Fortis experiences and represents Croatian literature, and the role it plays in Fortis’s understanding of culture and civilization. Fortis’s century, in spite of the impact that Rousseau, Ossian and Herder had on the contemporary culture, was nonetheless predominantly Classicist, the Classic art and literature being reinterpreted in the view of the bourgeois understanding of the Enlightenment. However, by the end of the 18th century this model started to disintegrate. It was replaced by the aesthetics that represents a very important turn in the history of modern art and literature. In Italian art, Classicist standard norm allowed for its merging with the aesthetics of Sentimentalism, thus foreseeing proto-Romanticism and Romanticism. Fortis’s research in natural sciences spontaneously turns out as a sort of a monograph about the Croatian coast, since it includes ethnologic, sociologic, cultural and literary data. The wide ranging scope of facts situates Croatia firmly within the European tradition. In Fortis’s study the most important names and facts about the Croatian literature of the time are to be found. Numerous quotations show that Fortis considered literature as a reliable source of information. His epistolary travelogue Journeying through Dalmatia shows that »in the happy century of peace and furthering of the people’s welfare«, scientific discourse was based on humanistic resources, mainly on literature.

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