Songs of Birth and Dying
Collection of unconventional poems about love, written by a renowned Croatian poet.
11,00 € 6,60 €
Herbarium – Stories of Plants
Jana Prević Finderle’s “Herbarium” could both be seen as a follow-up to her debut “The travertine bridge”, published in 2019, and its sheer opposite. One could argue that it’s a follow-up, because it is a book of short prose inspired by the author’s own experiences, delivered in a simple and direct way – and that it’s an opposite, as “The travertine bridge” was dedicated to travels and encounters, a horizontal motion through space, while “Herbarium”, a book about the lives of plants and the people closest to the author, focuses on travelling vertically, through time. For every herbarium, including Jana’s, is a book of memories. It seems that we live in times of increased sensitivity for the green world that surrounds us, a world that is getting more endangered with every day. But Jana’s soft spot for plantlife isn’t a result of any trend, although the need to create a herbarium made of words could have been influenced by the increasing eco-awareness in times of global warming. This author has, since early childhood, been living her life in close connection to plantlife, which enables her to talk about it from a personal, almost lyrical, perspective. Her authentic language depicts a simple closeness. The focus doesn’t lie on a problem or on the author’s knowledge of botany – which she clearly has – but rather on her personal experiences, her discoveries, little miracles she encounters, like the ones where her aunt Mirjana, in Jana’s adolescent days of spleen, tells her about an acorn and an oak.
Format: 11×20
ISBN: 978-953-8313-52-3
Number of pages: 105
Paperback
Published: 2022.
Slični naslovi
Some Call them Lady-Writers
This study in literary history brings to light various characteristics of the Croatian female literary scene in the late 19th and early 20th century. Focusing on three key figures – Dragojla Jarnević, Jagoda Truhelka and Ivana Brlić Mažuranić – the author makes visible a complex tissue of influences, shared existential preoccupations, positions on writing and recurrent literary motifs. The fundamental question leading her research – what was it like to be a female writer in a period where writing was still largely attributed to a male intellect? – thus gets a rich answer that tries to restore justice to silenced female voices. As the area of Croatian female literature is still largely unexplored, Dujić’s study presents an almost pioneering work that brings the reader not only a historical analysis, but also excerpts from previously unpublished archive materials: letters, diaries and personal notes by the three great writers around whom this book revolves.
The Lives of Troubadours
Sanja Lovrenčić’s book presents biographical texts by anonymous authors from the 13th and 14th century that depicted the lives of troubadours. Medival biographical texts about troubadours are a very old testimony about the interest that lives of artist awakened in their contemporaries. In a time where the only biographies written were those of saints and important rulers, poets are the only group of people that defy that rule – by being written about. Their biographies were written in a language that in medieval times, among others, was called “lenga d’oc”. Today this language is mostly referred to as Occitan, and it is considered to have been Europe’s first literary language after the classical period.
Berlin Childhood around 1900
Over the last few decades Walter Benjamin has become one of the most prominent names in the humanities: considering definitions of modernity, film theory, philosophy of history, cultural studies or criticism of canonical literary texts, his work can hardly be avoided. This is brought about by Benjamin’s broad interests and lucidity, but also by his awareness of the fact that cultural theory or philosophy always implies an act of writing. His penchant towards the use of metaphor, image, allusion rather than systematical argumentation and his insistence on a purified stile rather than a strict composition make Benjamin’s texts – that always place themselves between philosophy and literature – a field of knowledge that never allows an unambiguous interpretation. In his Berlin Childhood around 1900 the dominant element is precisely this ‘surplus’ of literature; applying an autobiographical discourse, Benjamin creates a lyrical picture of his childhood in a rich bourgeois family from Berlin. Nevertheless, this seemingly personal thematic becomes a historically relevant document that bears witness to the life and culture of the big city, evoking a great number of social and philosophical issues: the constitution of subject through memory, the shadow of class struggle, the possibility of objective historical representation, the relation between modernism and messianism. Starting from a specific literary genre, Berlin Childhood around 1900 amplifies the tension between philosophy and literature, the tension that makes them both possible: thus Benjamin anticipates some of the most important themes and techniques of post-structuralism, and stays as modern as ever.