The paper, published in an established Canadian journal, deals with the Slovenian national poet France Prešeren and his most famous narrative poem Baptism on the Savica (1836). Nineteenth-century literature witnessed the move from classical to modern writing: while peripheral European literatures seek to establish national identity with the aid of the epic as a privileged form of classical writing, the central and well-established national literatures demonstrate their identity with the novel as a popular form of modern writing. In Slovenian culture, Prešeren’s "Baptism", which thematises the involuntary compromise of an epic hero and his renouncement of the national cause, was paradoxically canonised as a sacred text that defines “Slovenianness” and as such gives rise to ever new reinterpretations. This is in contrast to Jurčič’s The Tenth Brother (1866), the first Slovenian novel, which – according to Moretti’s formula – comes across as an (unhappy) compromise between a foreign genre form imported from the centre and the local Slovenian subject matter and perspective. This is why, in the 19th century, a peripheral nation was constituting itself on the “sacred text” of a compromise but singular epic, rather than merely on the mass printing of compromise novels.
COBISS.SI-ID: 39243053
The paper (published in Slovenian) investigates how the library, collected by Baron Žiga Zois, influenced the development of Slovene cultural nationalism. First, it explains why the largest public libraries in Slovene ethnic territory - the Seminary and the Lyceum Library in Ljubljana - were relatively unimportant for the shaping of Slovene national identity in that period. The paper then describes the beginnings and growing of the Zois library, especially of its Slovene and Slavic parts. Finally, it shows how the library stimulated Slovene and Slavic national revivals. In conclusion, it states that the Zois library should be urgently organized, presented, and preserved as a corpus separatum in the National and University Library in Ljubljana on account of its importance.
COBISS.SI-ID: 39250477
The article was published in an American journal of Slovene studies (written in English, published in 2015 with the year of issue 2014; so it could not be considered for the 2014 report). Researching the naming of the streets falls into a wider area of (collective) memory studies and is quite important element of canonization (as developed in this project). The article focuses on the onomastics of the streets in Ljubljana, in the inner town centre of the Slovenian capital, which borrowed their names from the Slovenian writers (so-called literary streets). The Slovenian literature was a constitutive element of the national culture. This fact points to the positioning of practice of the literary naming into the framework of the spatial practices of the national character. First, the literary streets are shown in a diachronic perspective. Here, we’re trying to answer the question: in what time sequence the writers entered the pantheon of the capital’s inner centre and helped to give meaning to the narrative arch of the literary-historical “narrative”. The second question is: how the literary streets code the ideological messages in the synchronic perspective. For this part the open-source program GPS Visualizer and the application Google Earth were used.
COBISS.SI-ID: 58979170