Was Croatian Literary Modernism Anti-Catholic? One Conceptual Aspect of the Dispute Between “the Old” and “the Young” in Croatian Literature at the End of the 19th
and the Beginning of the 20th Century Cover Image

Je li hrvatski književni modernizam bio antikatolički usmjeren? Jedan idejni vidik polemike između „starih” i „mladih” u hrvatskoj književnosti na prijelazu između 19. i 20. st.
Was Croatian Literary Modernism Anti-Catholic? One Conceptual Aspect of the Dispute Between “the Old” and “the Young” in Croatian Literature at the End of the 19th and the Beginning of the 20th Century

Author(s): Vladimir Lončarević
Subject(s): Christian Theology and Religion, History, Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Theology and Religion
Published by: Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: Croatian Moderna; dispute between “the old” and “the young”; anticlericalism; anti- -Catholicism

Summary/Abstract: An interesting conceptual dispute, usually called a confrontation between “the old” and “theyoung”, developed at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Although by itsname defined as a “clash of generations”, the dispute was basically rooted in differences betweentwo groups of writers concerning their attitudes toward arts: of traditionalists, whose starting pointwas the principle of the unity of truth, beauty and good, and of modernists, who relied on aestheticism and concept of l’art pour l’art’. “The young”, while upholding individualism, particularlyused to stress their anti-Catholicism. The author checks whether at their root there was anti-Catholicism. He comes to the conclusion that Croatian Moderna was not an organised anti-Christianor anti-Chatolic movement, even though it isn’t doubtful that anticlericalism of “the young”, toa large degree, assumed contours of antagonism towards public expression of Catholicism in culture, harbingering at the same time secularist conceptual processes that were expressed later in thepolitical field and all the other fields of social life.

  • Issue Year: 2016
  • Issue No: 10
  • Page Range: 297-311
  • Page Count: 15
  • Language: Croatian