Paper short abstract:

Authors analyze the literary construct of Croatian countryside, more closely formed in the period of Croatian Illyrian movement, as envisioned in the travelogue of A. G. Matoš Around Lobor and its relation to notion of contemporary village.

Paper long abstract:

As a particularly prolific motif, the Croatian countryside made a great entrance in the Croatian literature in the period of romanticism and realism. Evolving out of the Illyrian political movement (1835-1848), the dichotomy consisting of romantic idealization of rural landscape on the one hand and the depravity of the urban setting on the other, has been widely accepted and perpetuated in the works of some of the greatest Croatian authors of that time. Accordingly, such image of rural landscape is particulary exemplified in Antun Gustav Matoš's modernist travelogue Around Lobor. Although not without criticism, the countryside here as well (presented as a series of images during the author's travel) serves as a backdrop for a highly idealized representation of Croatian heroic past, as well as a chronotope of core values and morals in contrast to "shallow everyday life". Such imagery in Around Lobor is accompanied by the descriptions of decaying nature, not uncommon to contemporary representations of countrylife in Croatian everyday media discourse. We will analyze (1) how Matoš created (counter)memory of "utopistic" image of countryside, constructed by the revivalist Illyrian movement and how are these ideologemes presented in literary text; (2) how has this representation of Croatian countryside survived to this day and has it - and in what way - re-defined its semantic scope in everyday public discourse.