Original scientific paper
ORAL PROSE IN CROATIAN LITERATURE (ET THE ENDS OF TWO CENTURIES)
Ljiljana Marks
; Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Zagreb
Abstract
The nineteenth century in Croatia was marked by the revelation of its own history, as the great historiographic works of Racki, Smiciklas, Kukuljevic and Tkaliic can show. The literary writers, such as Bogovic, Freudenreich, Tkalcic, Senoa and To mid, are also a part of this flow, and they are allowed to do something strictly forbidden for the historians - to blend legends with history. This was how so many historical subjects and their poetical versions had emerged at the time. The prosaic oral tradition is deeply inrooted into the Croatian art literature of the exactly this period, which is almost paradigmatically shown by Genoa’s literary opus. Parts of oral prose tradition (the whole stories, their fragments, paraphrases, associations at some topics or motifs, syntagms, and the reflections of beliefs) are viewed as the intertextual parts within a literary work as a whole, and they are being analyzed on both the narrative and the stylographic levels. The difference between the usage of oral tradition in the works of older and contemporary writers is emphasized. The contemporary writers use oral literature in two ways: as Proustovian sentimental journey to their childhood, or as witty, self-ironic, de-theatrelized approach to their own past.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
214745
URI
Publication date:
10.10.1998.
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