Review article
Judita in the Oldest High School Readers
Lahorka Plejić Poje
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Abstract
The paper briefly throws light on the fate of Judita in Croatian senior high
school readers up to the year 1901, in other words, during the time when the
reception of Marulić’s verse in Croatian was negligible and Marulić regularly
appeared only in the form of excerpts in readers. In the first, the Illyrian Reader
of 1856, Judita was represented by a selection, of the first 120 lines, which was
the first publication of any kind after the long-previous fifth edition of the work.
Because Marulić at the time the Illyrian Reader was being prepared was an almost
unknown writer, from the current perspective nevertheless the publication of this
fragment was an important event, even if it elicited no very great response. Nor
were there any important receptive ripples after the publication of the reader of
Franjo Petračić (1880) or the revised edition of the same text published by Ferdo
Ž. Miler (1895). This lowly status in the readers, however, was at odds with Miler’s
youthful discussion of 1877 in which he called for a more careful reading of Judita,
suggesting strategies for the reading of the old Chakavian text. But since the
pedagogy and philology of the time were much influenced by the approach of Vuk
Karadžić, which sought from literature an emanation of the »national spirit« and
pure, simple diction, Marulić’s Croatian verses remained a mere curiosity better
left to the school readers.
Keywords
Judita; high school readers; Illyrian Reader; Franjo Petračić; Ferdo. Ž. Miler
Hrčak ID:
277984
URI
Publication date:
10.6.2022.
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