engleski

Latin poets in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dubrovnik

After the dissolution of the Ragusan Republic, with Dubrovnik falling under French (1806) and subsequently Austrian rule (1815), literature in Latin continued to be written by some thirty authors active in the city’s intellectual circle. Although their work is shaped largely by these newly emerged political and social circumstances, as well as the shifting literary trends of the period, it is also undoubtedly influenced by the earlier generation of Dubrovnik Latinists – Ruđer Bošković, Benedikt Stay, Rajmund Kunić, and Bernard Džamanjić – who attained considerable renown not only in Italy, where they mostly resided, but in a broader international purview. The paper examines how the new generation of Dubrovnik Latinists, writing in their shadow, related to this illustrious quartet of their predecessors. Specifically, it reviews and compares their thematic and generic predilections, and also looks at a number of further features shared, to a greater or lesser degree, by writers of both generations, including their education in Jesuit or Piarist colleges, membership in literary academies, their interest in classical antiquity and in the Latin language at a time when its influence on public life was waning, or views on vernacular literature and oral tradition. Although the younger generation was receptive to contemporary literary and cultural currents, and made certain advances in this respect, their backward gaze – which, along with a lack of talent, is the most frequent criticism addressed at their work – might be due precisely to the exceptional success of their great Latinist precursors in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Croatian Neo-Latin literature ; Dubrovnik ; literary academies ; occasional poetry

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