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The paper presents the overview of peripheral oral forms recorded in Split and its immediate surroundings in the form of written and inscribed graffiti. In contemporary theory of literature, peripheral oral forms are described as a part of the non-fictional literature mostly defining stories from everyday life. What certainly intrigues readers and observers of these forms is their accentuated and dominant humor. Therefore, in the corpus of selected oral texts written in graffiti in the area of Split, we will present the context of the so-called everlasting Mediterranean satire. Through the graffiti, as a part of the literary structure, the poetics of short literary forms will be analyzed as the closest forms in the literary reality of previously determined (modern) proverbs and aphorisms. The aim of the paper is to present, first of all, graffiti located in Split, in the domain of peripheral oral texts, presenting their poetics which includes unusual communication, whereupon the author addresses the target recipient or the group of recipients. Particular attention will be given to a review of the specifics of graffiti in the world of peripheral oral forms in which the recipient is an active participant (Tomašić 2011), who replies to her/his own graffiti text, changing it and often erasing it, thus creating new forms and (re)shaping the recorded everyday life stories.
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Croatian literature and culture belong to the three neighboring civilizational and cultural circles: the Mediterranean, the Central European and the Balkanian. The role of each respective circle and the proportions among them depend on the place and the historical context in question. In both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, Croatian culture is an illustrative example of a polycentric and (cross)border culture whose identity is primarily Mediterranean and Central European. Its uniqueness, originality and unity stem from the richness and diversity of the cultural content of which it is composed. The Mediterranean component as a whole is very diverse and complex. This paper examines the importance of the categories of space and place in the humanities and the role of the Mediterranean in Croatian culture.
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Towards the end of 1974 and during 1975, in Zagreb-based cultural biweekly Oko (The Eye), Josip Sever publishes 15 supplements in the section under the headline “What did Josip Sever see“. Supplements are very diverse in themes as well as in genre and style. What connects them are a unique author’s optics and a surprising introduction of abundance of discourse exclusivities which are characteristic for lyrical speech in literary journalism context. This article singles out and describes key characteristics of the expressions from Sever’s texts and tries to interpret the sense of their edginess.
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During four decades of Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina, economic, social and cultural circumstances had improved, as well as the position of women, who started participating in public life as educational workers, translators and writers. In this article, special attention is drawn to Anka Topić, first Bosnian-Herzegovinian women poet, who in 1909 published an individual collection of poems Lost Star (Izgubljena zvijezda). The analysis focuses on her transformation from a poet altruistically celebrating the transnational brotherhood and unity of all peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the romantic folklore spirit, to a tribune writing occasional poems to Croatian notables in Bosnia and Herzegovina and propagating the idea of a strictly Croatian Bosnia in the realms of the Monarchy.
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Although verses as a form are rarely chosen by autobiographers, the history of Croatian autobiography shows that some writers have had the inclination towards writing autobiographies in verses. The form of a poem can be linked with the beginnings of writing autobiographical texts and with the autobiographical discourse in the works of Croatian writers. Even though it has not been in the focus of interest of autobiographical theory, the autobiographical elements can be found in the period spanning from the 15th- and 16th-century Croatian poetry in the works of the Croatian Latinists up to the present time which represents the golden period of autobiographic writing. Focusing on the autobiographers’ inclination to write in verse (from heterogenous autobiographies, where verses are incorporated into the text itself, to autobiographies poems), this paper shows the marginal place that the form of a poem occupies in the field of researching and defining autobiography as a genre. The fact has been corroborated by providing an outline of verses in autobiographies and autobiographies in verses throughout the history of Croatian literature. Special attention is given to two autobiographies-poems, written by two contemporary writers of Croatian Moderna ‒ Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (Autoportrait from Rogaška Slatina; 1932) and Vladimir Nazor (Autobiography; 1927). Having in common the form and some themes and motifs (such as looking back at their lives, the author, the narrator and the main character being one and the same person, retrospective perspective), these two autobiographies show how placing emphasis on intimate elements, the form of a poem can be used to write an autobiography. Without putting into question the theme, the place of the narrator/poet in telling about or taking attitude towards the reality or experiences lived, factographic elements which dominate the early 20th century autobiographies, here are largely overshadowed by the more personal and emotional elements.
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This paper presents a brief review of the position of poetry written by Šokci Croats in the context of Croatian poetry in the part of Bačka that belongs to Vojvodina. Particular attention is placed upon the poet Stipan Bešlin, who lived in the inter-war period. We analyse the representation of the mentioned poet on Croatian ground during his life till nowadays. In addition, Bešlin’s poetry is thematically reviewed; his poetry, his stylistic and linguistic choices are researched. It is shown that Bešlin’s poetic destiny is marginalised from different aspects. He is marginalised as a šokavian poet from Bačka, and as a poet who is Catholic as well as a poet whose first book of poems was published thirty years after his death, in a politically inconvenient moment. The poems Bešlin wrote short before his early death are considered his best poetic work.
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Kajkavian literature of the pre-Illyrian movement was often seen as a less valuable segment of national literature and for that reason was already placed in a peripheral literary phenomenon. That literature often was underestimated because of religious character, utilitarianism and didactics. In the 20th century, when the dialectical literature emerged, Kajkavian literature was recognised as equal in Croatian literature. The main purpose of the paper is the analysis of peripheral literary characters who were appearing in the Enlightenment period in Kajkavian literature at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. In that period secular topics were included in the Kajkavian literature and reached its culmination, especially in the drama. The paper will explore which literature types are represented by these literary characters and which civic values they represent. The analysis will cover several titles from the secular Kajkavian prose and drama from the late 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, a work entitled Adolf iliti kakvi su ljudi by Jakob Lovrenčić and Kajkavian drama adaptations performed on the stage of the school theatre at Kaptol Roman-Catholic Preparatory. The Illyrian movement forcefully and deliberately stopped Kajkavian literary production. Immediately after the Illyrian movement Kajkavian language was used to characterize a type of literary character whose purpose was mocking and creating a comic effect. The work will explore at which moment the literary characters of Kajkavian peripheries become inspirational to Croatian writers as representatives of a certain milieu and worldview. Particularly interesting will be the analysis of literary characters from the collection of stories Croatian God Mars by Miroslav Krleža and the paper will answer the question on the universal values of the literary characters of Kajkavian periphery and their purpose in the national literature.
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In this paper, the author examines a work of one of the most significant Croatian literary writers, Ante Kovačić, whose novel U registraturi (In the Registry Office) is considered by many literary critics and theoreticians to be the best writing of Croatian realism. It is an author who was not understood at the time when his work appeared, which is why the text was published in the form of a novel with a twenty-three year delay. Nonlinear composition of the text, elements of fantasy literature and innovative literary process in creating a fabula and sujet course of events confused literary critics as well as readership, which points to the fact that Ante Kovačić was treated for a long time as a peripheral author. In this narrative text, the misery and helplessness of peasants and their revolt against their feudal lords in Croatia are described, therefore the object of our analysis will be the characterisation of figures from various layers of society, with a particular focus on the “peripheral characters” of Kovačić’s prose. Using the term “peripheral characters” we will attempt to bring close those characters of subjugated peasants in relation to the feudal-capitalist social layer and thereby emphasise their role in the novel in relation to their fate. Unlike the characters of the peasants – Ivica Kičmanović (whom the social order turns into a lackey and scoundrel); Jožica Zgubidan (the personification of a poor person from Zagorje), Anica (a patriarchal girl with an angelic face); Miha; Perica; the neighbouring Kanoniks; and the Medonjićes – Kovačić brings us harsh, drastic images of moral vacillations in the city in which figures, distorted into caricatures, dominate. By contrasting the rural environment with the city life, the author is writing an “epopee of the village and city” in which the “peripheral characters” become tragic ones. These characters are the carriers of elements of “fantastic realism,” and their function is to show all the depravities of society and to announce the phenomenon of the innovative processes of narration familiar to authors of the modern literature. Finally, we come to the conclusion that Ante Kovačić made a step forward in relation to the generation of realists, with the peripheral position of his creation disappearing with the emergence of modern literary achievements, which ultimately gives the author and his work a polished place in Croatian literature.
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In this paper we will analyze the personal choice of individuals, who chose peripheral life on the island which is their prison and their freedom at the same time. Though eager to do so, the protagonists of the novel, Mali and Draga, do not escape from the island. They are essentially prisoners of their own choice, from which they apparently try to escape, not escaping only from responsibilities and obligations that tie them to the island, that is, to nurturing a handicapped old women Madonna. In self-deprivation and oppression satisfying Madonna’s wishes, Mali voluntarily fulfills her desires, aware of the nonsense in which he dives, conscious of alienation, which he cannot resist. Although, at one point, Mali will pronounce all of his own disappointment, the reader will not accept it as the main hero’s awareness about the failure of life but she/he will rather “involve” in a postmodernist way in author’s thinking and his attitude towards the main character. The essence of the psychological lies not in the fact that the writer played with the possibility of rejecting the protagonist, but, on the contrary, enabled him to choose his path, which led him to the island, on which he remains. The bareness of life was reduced by the literary process to the final outcome of the earthly existence. Without coercion or request, just by rough realistic method, the writer points to the masculinity of the main character, who is firm, does not give up on his ideals, but at the same time remains a prisoner of his habits. With the abundance of biblical motifs and symbols, Slobodan Novak created the hero of the novel who grows out of the narrative events and who is not uniform, but in the given situations he changes, resisting, retreating or adjusting. In the atmosphere of the stagnant island an ironic and scathing prose was made, whose main protagonists accepted peripherality as a habit.
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The paper presents the motives of cultural memory which were recorded in the oral epic poems and in the tradition in Dalmatia (the Neretva Valley and Boka kotorska). The territory of Dalmatia bordered with the Ottoman Empire at the time of the Croatian-Ottoman wars, thus the oral literature of this area produced oral epic poem as a reflection of forced war and fateful contacts. Living on the frontier of Christianity and Islam has brought up a special frontier mentality which can be traced in modernity, not only through the preservation of the heritage festivities, but also through collective memory which defines the importance of the survival of everything that is geologically and culturally on margin with the threatening “other”.
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The research shows several key causes of the reception and literary-historical periphery of the rich literary oeuvre of the Croatian poet, essayist, storyteller and author of one drama, Sida Košutić. While much of the research to date has cited the ideological and world-view causes of Sida Košutić’s marginal position in the canon of national literature, the writer’s expression of the unspeakable at the key of the Christian mystical experience is predominantly explored here. Thus, this research fits in with the contemporary interest in the philosophy of language and literary theory in the problem of the expression of the unspeakable (L. Wittgenstein, K. Jaspers, J. Derrida, M. Sells, etc.). The prominent elements of mystical discourse in the writer’s lyrical expression are analyzed on the example of a poem (“Ime tvoje sveti se”) which brings the majoritiy of poetic techniques from the entire collection Vjerenička žetva. Mystical hermeticism is also one of the possible causes of the peripheral status of Sida Košutić’s work. However, if the interpretation includes postmodern approach to language, it can be concluded that the poetic expression goes beyond the semantic atomism (the unspeakable refers to different experiences, conditions and realities), opposing representationalism and referentialism language model. Sida Košutić’s critical subject finds its legitimacy in Christian mysticism. The work of this writer can be equally included in the poetic guidelines of Croatian modern literature of the first half of the 20th century, thus undermining the dominant notions of the center and periphery defined by the national literary canon.
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The paper will analyze Zadar’s components of Croatian literature in the period from 1840s until the first decade of the 20th century, marked by nationalintegrative processes and forming a modern national identity. The research object will be the specifics of the development of that part of Croatian literature as well as its relations to literary and historical processes in the center, the mainstream, of national literature – from national revival movements or the period of preromanticism and romanticism, through pre-realism and realism to the period of moderna and stronger integration of Zadar’s (provincial, Dalmatian) segment into central, national Croatian literature. Considerable attention will be paid to the processes of mutual permeating, accepting and rejecting, affirming and negating of Zadar’s periphery, one of the most important peripheries of the Croatian literary canon, and its national center, Zagreb’s mainstream. This issue will be presented through paradigmatic writers and journals that marked key periods of Croatian linguistic and literary homogenization: in the period of (pre)romanticism, during 1840s, this implies the journal Zora dalmatinska and paradigmatic personalities of the literary circle formed around that revival journal (Šime Starčević and Petar Preradović, even Ana Vidović); in the period of folk-enlightenment (pre)realism, from the sixties to the end of the eighties, this includes paradigmatic personality of the Croatian National Revival in Dalmatia – politician and writer Mihovil Pavlinović, as well as Iskra journal and its editor Nikola Šimić (a writer who created a specific peripheral genre of folk stories from rural life); in the time of disintegration of realism and turning towards modernist styles this implies the initiator of Croatian modern literary criticism Jakša Čedomil and the prominent names of the Croatian literary canon in the period of moderna – Ivo Vojnović, Vladimir Nazor and Milan Begović, as well as Lovor magazine of Milutin Cihlar Nehajev.
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Adela Milčinović, a Croatian writer with European and American address, a tireless worker in the struggle for women and children’s rights in Croatia in the first decades of the 20th century, is rarely mentioned in the history of Croatian literature as a self-employed writer, and more often just as the wife of the Croatian writer Andrew Milčinović and a coauthor of a collection of short stories entitled Pod branom (1903). In addition to her writing engagement, especially ignored and unexplored remains her feminist engagement in the time when Croatian female writers were not seriously understood in their intentions and contribution to the modern literature, being placed in its periphery, which can be perceived from the description of “Domaće ognjište,” a magazine in which women writers appeared with their first contributions, as the work of “mostly gentle hearts” (Matoš, 1976: 40). This paper presents Milčinović’s remarkable feminist engagement, reflected in the texts she wrote, which are mostly reviews of the negative critiques of the Croatian writers on “female” writing in Croatia at the turn of the century and in the first decades of the 20th century. Furthermore, we have raised the question whether the feminist engagement of the writer influenced her narrower writing interest, which will be researched by answering the question to what extent Milčinović’s female characters could be a reflection of the time the writer belonged to, which saw the major changes in Croatia both in literary and social terms.
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The emphasis of the paper is on the linguistic analysis of fragments from the novel Grička vještica written by Marija Jurić Zagorka. The paper objective is to answer how much linguistic craftsmanship defined this novel, and thus the literary work of Zagorka in general. It has been shown how language and literature in Zagorka’s writing intertwine. The language of the novel was analysed by extracting concrete fragments in which the lexics, stylistic figures and additional features of Zagorka’s style of writing were analysed. We researched how much attention was given to the language in building the plot. The arising question is how justified the position of Zagorka outside the literary canon is if her writing style does not differ significantly from the writers who are included in the canon.
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Oral literature exists as long as humankind. Through history, that kind of literature was known as folk, anonymous, folklore, traditional, peasant (during the reign of Croatian Peasant Party). Oral literature is the tradition of written literature. In the past, oral literature was often given more attention than the written, and sometimes it was neglected. A great interest in folk literature emerged in the Renaissance period. Michel de Montaigne was enthusiastic about folk poetry and since his time term folk literature has been in use. The oral literature has reached its peak of popularity during the Romanticism. Approach to the oral literature in Croatian histories of literature is fourfold. Some literary historians barely mention it in their histories. Others speak of it peripherally when dealing with, for example, Petar Hektorović, Ivan Gundulić, Andrija Kačić Miošić, and many others. Some literary historians write about both oral (folk) and written literature in their histories of literature. The final approach is by those authors who have written histories of oral (folk) literature. Some literary historians have written histories of oral literature. Maja Bošković-Stulli in collaboration with Divna Zečević dedicated the first book of 1978 edition Povijest hrvatske književnosti: u sedam knjiga to the oral literature. In that history, the authors wrote about folk literature alongside the oral. In 1990 Tvrtko Čubelić published a monograph Povijest i historija usmene narodne književnosti. Marko Dragić published Poetika i povijest hrvatske usmene književnosti in 2008 and Stipe Botica published Povijest hrvatske usmene književnosti in 2013.
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The paper presents the region of Imotska Krajina, or the so-called Imota, as a mythical homeland in selected poetry and prose works by Petar Gudelj. The concept of periphery will be considered, on the one hand, in terms of the geographic position of the mentioned area and its social and political “life on the edge” as well as in terms of its reflection in literary works while, on the other hand, the periphery will be recognized in the long-term Gudelj’s marginalization on the Croatian literary scene and in the elements of his poetics; “self-generation,” but also relying on tradition and oral literature. The analysis will show how the controversies and the contrast of the karst periphery make a fertile ground for (re)-building (literary) identity.
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There are numerous national minorities in Croatia supported by the state in their maintenance of minority languages, cultures and traditions. And many of these minorities with songs, dance and customs cherish their own literature, meaning poetry, prose, and drama written by their members in minority languages or in Croatian. These works are mostly known among members of the minorities, but sometimes it is difficult to find the way to readers of the majority of the population. An example of such a minority literature with a long tradition is literary creation of the Czech, who have been living in today’s Croatia for over two hundred years. Nowadays regularly or occasionally there are about thirty authors who write mostly in Czech, but to come to the readership, some of them have been translating their work into the Croatian language lately or leaving their mother tongue and starting to create in Croatian. Are Croatia’s minority works known and to what extent? What are the possibilities of writers using minority languages to publish their works? Why are minority literary works important, what can they offer to a broader readership and in what way can they enrich Croatian literature? How could they reach the majority population and could they wake up the interest beyond Croatian borders? And what difficulties do minority writers encounter? In the presentation, we will use the example of Czech minority literary works in Croatia to answer these and other issues related to minority literature emerging in Croatia, but remaining unknown to the Croatian public.
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Using the examples from Romanticism and Moderna period, this paper will examine the opposition centre-periphery regarding the role of the ideology of pan-Slavic reciprocity in the field of Polish-Croatian literary ties. Next, we will describe the process of attribution within literary and cultural history in which a series of so-called great authors have arisen, and to which their communities (Polish and Croatian) attribute central aesthetic and ideological roles. Further, starting from the assumption that the Polish and Croatian cultural communities used their literary canon to legitimise their own artistic and social inclinations, we shall attempt to determine the universalistic characteristics that allowed the Polish literary canon to become a desirable alternative and a source of homogenizing poetics that enabled the aesthetic synchrony of Croatian literature with a European paradigm in two literary periods – Romanticism and its younger relative, Moderna.
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