engleski

Think Globally, Act Zonally. Rethinking the Concept of Croatian Neo-Latin Literature

The starting point of this paper is a difference in style and generic repertoire between the Southern (Dalmatian, Mediterranean) and the Northern (Central European) Neo-Latin poetry of Croatian authors from 1650-ies to 1720-ies. Whereas in Dalmatia the dominant stylistic and generic option follows the 'classical' Latin poetry, in Northern Croatia the authors are prone to more 'baroque' style (concetto, complex metaphors, apostrophe, exuberant ennumerations) and technopaegnia, especially in the occasional and religious poetry. Although the basis of all Neo-Latin literature is the same, my hypothesis is that the differences in the poetry style and generic repertoire arise from the different cultural influences (Italian, Habsburg) their authors were dominantly exposed to. The abovementioned differences led us to re-examine the well established concept of Croatian Neo-Latin literature as a corpus and to think of a regional approach, in which the bounaries of a corpus would not be national, but zonal or regional (cf. the same approach to the contemporary vernacular poetry: Zoran Kravar, „Varijante hrvatskog književnog baroka“, Nakon godine MDC, Zagreb 1993, 39-69). This is especially approppriate in the case of Northern Croatian Neo-Latin poets in the given period, which were few (Despotović, Vičić, Vitezović, Simandi), but wrote biger amounts of text than the Southern Croatian authors, and all of them had a carreer 'abroad', generally in Habsburg lands. The regional approach is coherent with the concept established in the monograph Tyrolis Latina (2012) on the history of Tyrolean Neo-Latin literature, which takes Tyrol, today politically devided between Italy and Austria, as a historical, (multi)cultural region. I am going to compare some aspects of the Tyrolean and Northern Croatian Neo-Latin literature of the period to see if there are correspondences or common influences which can be established, such as recognizable influence of the Jesuit schooling system, very influential in both regions at the time.

Croatian neo-Latin literature ; literary history

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