The Tradition of Enlightenment and Enlightening in Serbian Periodicals
Tatjana Jovićević
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Publisher:Beograd: Institut za književnost i umetnost; Cataloguing data:UDK 050+070(497.11)"17/19" |
Summary:
Published on the occasion of marking the two hundredth anniversary of Dositej’s death, this collection of papers came into being guided by the wish to present the Enlightenment movement and the era of Enlightenment, most often almost personified by Dositej, in a broader context, and to research the tradition of Enlightenment ideas on the specially defined level of current public thought and action.
In chronological terms, this collection of papers encompasses a period starting from the anticipation of this corpus of ideas during the pre-Dositej era, before the constitution of the full doctrine of Enlightenment (Orfelin’s Magazine, 1768), to its echoes in the avant-garde publications coming out in the period between the great wars and in the Marxist though tradition of the 1950’s. At the same time, the issue of the scope and content of the term Enlightenment / enlightened / enlightening, and a review of “counter-Enlightenment” trends and ideas – to be found in Romanticism and in avant-garde movements, as well as, in certain forms, within the realist paradigm – was methodologically conceived as an integral; and significant part of the research efforts.
In view of having opted to research the totality of this heritage in periodical publications, conditioned by their media function, the issue of the presence of certain views or ideas is here fully manifested as a question of their dissemination among the public and the (cultural) policies that stood behind it. The incorporation of certain “axioms” taken over from this era in social and cultural standards marked both the cultural trends and the social and political concepts of the 19th and 20th centuries, so that the papers included in this collection follow their fate on various levels – literature, cultural, social and political history – helping to shed light on some of the central aspects of our heritage.
Keywords:
Dositej Obradović, Enlightenment, enlightened, enlightening, periodicals, magazine, the public, Serbian literature, cultural policy, modernisation processes
