Literary Self-Referentiality and the Formation of the National Literary Canon

Abstract

The author discusses the process of nationalizing literature, that is, the formation of a national literary canon in Slovene poetry from the Enlightenment to Post-Romanticism. The utopian projection and formation of a ‘Slovenised’ literary system has been intertwined with the successful establishment of a unified Slovene literary language. The use of images of Parnassus and Elysium, these topoi in the European cultural memory, was one of the self-regulatory strategies acquired by Slovene writers to mark the distinction between their own discourse and the norms of the ‘classics’ and a competitive comparison with other modern national literatures in order to achieve integration into the canon of ‘world literature’.