Serbian medieval poetry: 20th-century literary-historical and theoretical interpretations

Abstract

This paper examines how national literary histories written in the twentieth century define medieval Serbian poetry. Grounded in the canon of Byzantine liturgical poetry and dedicated to cult practice, hymnography often did not conform to modern poetic principles, originality, and metrical form. Formalist approaches to poetry shaped the anthologies of Serbian medieval literature published in Yugoslavia in the 1960s. The editors transformed sequences from narrative prose into poetic texts, thus creating medieval poems. These cases draw attention to the importance of textual criticism and the social context in defining medieval literary genres. Exploring hymnography as a linguistic and liturgical event - a poem sung to an engaged audience - introduces new perspectives on its interpretation.