engleski

Lowbrow Skepticism or Highbrow Rationalism? (Anti)Legends in 19th Century Croatian Primers

The paper will discuss one of numerous intersections of orality and literacy in the long 19th century Croatian society. More precisely, it will focus on the orallity of Croatian primers published from 1779 till the start of World War I. Insight into the form and formal devices such as typographic, syntactic and rhetoric reveals that these primers implied activation of characteristically oral strategies (voicing, dialogue etc). This merging of orality and print was inevitable form the fact that these primers were supposed to introduce literacy to the literally illiterate. Paradoxically but pragmatically, they used orality in order to spread literacy. Setting aside this line of merging orality and literacy, this paper will concentrate on the issue of these primers implementation of narratives that are today recognized as characteristic for the oral communication. In line with orientation of these primers toward modernization processes, today exemplary oral narratives such as jocular tales, tall tales and magic tales were not included in them until the second half of 19th century and spread of national movements. Belief narratives were the only exception. Almost every published primer included at least one, from contemporary folkloristics point of view, traditional belief narrative or, to put it more precisely, pseudo-, negative-, anti-legend (Dégh & Vázsonyi 1976). Namely, subversiveness of these belief narratives toward the rationalistic matrix of the primers was contained by rationalistic closing or opening formulas which rationalized their supernatural content. After the insight into the issue of marginality of anti-legends in the folklore collections and studies, as well after discussing differences and similarities between anti-legends published in primers and documented in folklore collections of the time and after, it will be questioned whether their inclusion in long 19th century Croatian primers was implementation of lowbrow skepticism or intrusion of highbrow rationalism, or both. Consequently, it will be questioned whether and under what conditions these narratives could be called anti-legends and do they and how anticipate and challenge the recent turn from belief to truth in legend studies (Corrigan Correll 2005, Oring 2008).

lowbrow; highbrow; anti-egends; 19th century; Croatia; primers

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