“East and West – Heart and Mind”: The Muslim Orient and the European Occident in Bosniak Literature at the End of the 19th and the Beginning of the 20th Century

Abstract

The paper presents a comprehensive but still concise view of the phenomenon of interrelation between the Muslim Orient and the European West in modern Bosniak literature, i.e. in Bosniak literary practice from the late 19th century onwards, up to the present moment. The Muslim Orient and the European West encounter directly in Bosniak literature especially after 1878, which is the year that is therefore the dividing line between the so-called older and modern Bosniak literature. This encounter left a deep mark in modern Bosniak literature, but also in the culture of Bosniaks and Bosnia-Herzegovina in general, crucially modelling more or less all fundamental processes in modern Bosniak literary practice, and particularly the processes of cultural memory in terms of both memory of literature and memory in literature, as well as literature as a form of collective memory. This innovative view of the Bosniak literary past is realized from different methodological and theoretical perspectives, starting from classical literary and cultural history as well as interliterary and intercultural history of literature, through cultural poetics or post-colonial studies, to imagology and cultural memory studies, etc.