The Reception of Older Poetry in the Pannonian Language Area

‘The Reception of Older Poetry in the Pannonian Language Area’ is a two-year postdoctoral research project delves into an area that has so far been overlooked in Slovenian literary history. It renounces the traditional division of national literatures into centres and peripheries and tries to prove that an independent literary-linguistic system existed in the geographical area of ​​medieval Lower Pannonia from the sixteenth century, and that this culturally strongly connected space was divided in the long nineteenth century by the centripetal tendencies of young political nations, such as Slovenia. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Slovenian and Croatian national literary history has treated Pannonian literature in East Styria, Prekmurje, Burgenland and the Kajkavian area as dialectal and marginal due to the non-acceptance of a single national literary language (Carniolan and Štokavian). The proposed research will present a new, holistic view of multilingual literature in the Pannonian linguistic-geographical area, disregarding today’s national and state borders of Slovenia, Croatia, Austria and Hungary, mainly with the help of lesser-known or completely unknown hymnals.

The spatial framework of the research is represented by four language areas (and their literatures) in the former Pannonian territory of the Habsburg Monarchy and Hungary: East Styria, Prekmurje, the Kajkavian area and Burgenland. The timeframe is the period from the formation to the decline of all of the four Pannonian literatures whose language is identified as literary in this research, that is, from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. The emphasis will be on hymnals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the research presupposes and proves the existence of a longer or older poetic tradition that was transmitted orally and was mostly written down only in later periods. Thematic and text-critical analysis will therefore be at the forefront of the research. The analysis and publication of the results is largely based on the methods of auxiliary historical sciences, digital humanities, comparative studies and linguistic analysis.

The project will include a comparative analysis of the most common and characteristic religious and secular poetic genres in this period. Based on the review of manuscripts and printed hymnals to date, the following genres stand out among religious genres of poetry: festive, saintly, Mary’s, Christ’s and eschatological songs. Among the secular poetic genres, the most characteristic are those that have been included in the curricula of grammar schools: these are elegy, idyll, ode and didactic poems, while war poems and national revival poem are often represented in handwritten songbooks. Comparative analysis will discover and analyse those religious poems that show a transcriptional tradition in Pannonian hymnals. This is less present in secular poetry, as, for example, a modern authorial concept was already being established in the Romantic period. In this type of poetry, I will therefore focus mainly on the analysis of poetic themes, motifs, ideas and stanza forms.

The planned results of the project include the online publication of codicological descriptions and facsimiles of hitherto unknown Prekmurje manuscript hymnals, an interactive exhibition of Prekmurje, Styrian and Kajkavian hymnals at the University Library Maribor, lectures in Slovenia and abroad, publication of two scientific articles in central Slovenian and Croatian literary journals, and a monograph of the project leader in both printed and electronic form.