engleski

Ivan Mažuranić’s The Death of Smail-aga Čengić (1846): The Controversial Reception of an Epic Poem

The epic poem "The Death of Smail-aga Čengić" is located at the intersection of several historical narratives that carry various seemingly mutually exclusive ideological contents (liberal, nationalistic, even racist). Mažuranić's Islamophobia can be studied in the historical discourse, but as a part of cultural imagery it still represents some kind of an uneasy historical controversy. Historians are reluctant to study historical narratives, i.e., the stereotypical narrativization of historical insights, maybe because this kind of research includes a critical analysis not only of so- called factual sources and historiography but also of fictional texts. Some branches of contemporary literary studies, especially (poststructuralist) narratology, are less hesitant in dealing with such matters. The results of such investigations, in spite of their seemingly arbitrary methodological procedures, may be useful, at least as further research hypotheses, for participants of the analyzed culture (cultural insiders) as confrontation with historical interpretations/manipulations, for domestic and foreign experts (cultural outsiders) as historical meta-knowledge and deep generalizations, and finally for the theory as case-study material for revealing cultural tendencies.

Illyrian Movement, the Anti-Turkish historical narrative, axiology, intrinsic evaluation

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