Literary periodicals are not only a kind of a treasury of literary-historical and cultural facts, they are also a specific form of structuring the overall literary and poetic practice within a given time segment and culturological framework. Being a reflection and a mirror of literary and cultural life, periodicals are one of their generators and regulators, and are therefore indispensable within the framework of national literary and cultural-historical research. As a specific form of literary institutionalisation, periodicals and papers reveal diverse development options within the literary sphere and determine their order, while at the same time showing how, over time, the established literary tradition is brought into question under the pressure of new, alternative and experimental undertakings. That is why the focus of the research in the project “The Role of Serbian Literary Periodicals in the Formation of Literary, Cultural and National Models” will be on following poetics- and genre-related changes in the Serbian literary periodical of the 19th and 20th centuries, and their role in constituting the dominant poetic paradigms of the epoch and the national literary canon.
Since literary periodicals, compared to an individual literary work or a text, constitute a more heterogeneous and looser historical framework, in which, apart from aesthetic ones, there also exist numerous other realia ‒ ideological, moralistic, scientific, social-cultural ones, they are also a precious source when it comes to studying national cultural models. Finally, as an area of social practice, literary periodicals are not devoid of struggles for social power (even in situations when they bring it into question). Namely, by imposing certain criteria of beauty, ethical, ideational or universal values, periodicals directly influence the formation of a national model as an essential element of the cultural development of every people.
