The Role of Serbian Periodicals in the Formation of Literary, Cultural and National Models

Literary periodicals are not just a treasury of sorts, comprising a multitude of literary-historical and cultural facts, but also a specific form of structuring the overall literary and poetic practice in a particular time segment and culturological framework and are therefore irreplaceable when it comes to national literary and cultural-historical studies. That is why the focus of the research conducted within the framework of the project will be on monitoring the poetic and genre-related changes in the Serbian literary periodicals of the 19th and the 20th century, and their contribution to constituting the dominant artistic paradigms of the epoch and establishing literary canons. In view of the fact that, in relation to an individual work of art or a text, literary periodicals provide a more heterogeneous and looser historically delineated framework, wherein, apart from aesthetic factors, there exist many others – ideological, moralist, scientific, socio-cultural ones, they also represent a valuable source for studying the national cultural model. Finally, as a sphere of social practice, literary periodicals are not exempt from struggles for social power (even in situations when they bring it into question). Namely, by imposing certain criteria pertaining to the category of the beautiful, to ethical, ideological or universal values, periodicals directly influence the formation of a national model as a significant regulator of cultural development.