Young Bosnia: Literary Action 1908-1914

Abstract

Literary work and criticism was a significant aspect of the public activity of the short-lived Young Bosnia movement, but an aspect which has been unjustly neglected in historiography or overshadowed by the political aspect marked by the struggle for national liberation. Much as the movement was unstructured, contradiction-ridden and often uncertain whether to give precedence to the ethical or the aesthetic dimension of literature, its openness to the pace-setting European cultures gave an impetus to laying the literary and intellectual groundwork for the modernization of not only the local literary scene in Bosnia-Herzegovina but also of the shared cultural space in interwar Yugoslavia.