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CROATIAN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE ON THE VERGE OF A NEW PERIOD

A lesser known national literature is conventionally approached by providing an overview of authors and their works. However, it seems that a more productive and comprehensive approach to Croatian children’s literature might be an overview of publishing activities and reading practices. The first known work of Croatian children's literature is The First Glagolitic Primer (Prva glagoljska početnica), and the first non-utalitarian work of children's literature is a translation of the German novel by Joachim Heinrich Campe The Young Robinson published in 1796. Croatian children’s literature developed in an evolutionary process until 1945, when forces external to literature penetrated it, interrupting its course and imposing the values adopted by the Communist regime. Children’s literature continued to develop under rigid ideological control. The latest period of Croatian children’s literature started in the late 1980s, with dramatic historical changes in Eastern Europe. In its transition from a Communist system to a democracy, Croatia, just like all other transition countries, encountered various difficulties. Also some of traumatic experiences were shared by a large number of countries that emerged from multi- national states of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. However, the traumatic experiences caused by The War for Independence (1991-1995) are specific only to Croatia. Among the conditions determining the form and state of contemporary Croatian children's literature we should also mention the global fact of the technological tsunami, owing to which computers became the main toy and consumer of children’s free time. Inevitably, all these developments had their impact on Croatian children’s literature. The first overview of Croatian children’s literature was published in 1895 while the first theoretical works on poetics of children’s literature were published in 1885. However, the first academic courses on children’s literature were not introduced before the academic year 1961/1962. Moreover, they were not introduced as part of the curricula in departments of the Croatian language and literature but in higher education institutions for teacher training. Initial wavering, mixing with courses on methods of teaching, the patronizating attitude of “high literature” (i.e. literature for adults) marked the development of children’s literature studies for a long time, and are still present. In their first decades, in addition to these difficulties, efforts to conduct research into children’s literature were made in a social system marked with rigid ideological control. This meant that research findings were expected to serve as a confirmation that Yugoslav society, whose ideological tenets included socialism, anti- colonialism and nurturing of the "brotherhood and unity" of Yugoslav peoples, was undoubtedly on the right path. However, parts of these efforts which were not influenced by ideology, laid a solid foundation on which the contemporary research of children’s literature is built: decades of academic research contributed to the creation of an environment in which the second and third generation of researchers write their PhDs in children’s literature. The general attitude of Croatian research community is that development can be achieved only if it is open to others both in terms of institutional networking and of opening its journals to researchers from other communities.

Croatian Young Adult Literature; History of Croatian Children's Literature

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