The Traditional and the Modern in Serbian Periodicals at the Turn of the Century (1895–1914): a collection of papers
Slobodanka Peković i Vesna Matović
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Publisher:Beograd: Institut za književnost i umetnost; Novi Sad: Matica srpska; Cataloguing data: |
Summary:
This collection of papers is dedicated to shedding light on an issue that was of particular importance for Serbian literature at the beginning of the 20th century. The relationship between the traditional and the modern determined not only the relations in the sphere of art and culture but also the relations in politics and everyday life. In this collection, a lot of attention was paid to a comparative analysis of Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian periodicals, the typology of literary and other texts, analysing their editorial policy, issues pertaining to genres, certain writers, contributors to periodicals, the historical and the cultural context, the issue of Yugoslavism, the correlation and the reception of foreign writers and periodicals, music, the theatre, technical and fine arts. All these issues served to determine the measure of the traditional and the modern in periodicals.
At the beginning of the 20th century, literary periodicals had an emancipatory and an educational role; on the one hand, they respected tradition as a cultural and national heritage, but on the other, they strove to attain the modern role models from Western Europe. These two principles were intertwined, so that in literature the differences between them were not always easily discernible. Both traditional and modern patterns were used side by side. The Moderna and its literary model stood in contrast to the work of realists, and on the basis of what it proclaimed and achieved, it was a new and strong literary formation. But during that period this model was also designated as decadent. Thus the position of the Moderna was a twofold one, in that it was depicted as avant-garde and revolutionary, as well as decadent, dark and retarding. In literary periodicals, the old and the young – modernists and traditionalists, jointly developed the cultural and literary climate.
Keywords:
the Moderna, periodicals, editorial policy, the traditional, the modern, culture, genre
