Serbian Culture - Literature

Literature

Main article: Serbian literature

Miroslav's Gospel is one of the earliest works of Serbian literature dating from between 1180 and 1191 and one of the most important works of the medieval period. This work was entered into UNESCO's Memory of the World program in 2005. Serbian epic poetry was a central part of medieval Serbian literature based on historic events such as the Battle of Kosovo.

In the 20th century, Serbian literature flourished and a myriad of young and talented writers appeared.

The most well known authors are Ivo Andrić, Miloš Crnjanski, Meša Selimović, Borislav Pekić, Danilo Kiš, Milorad Pavić, David Albahari, Miodrag Bulatović, Dobrica Ćosić, Zoran Živković and many others. Jelena Dimitrijević and Isidora Sekulić are two early 20th century women writers. Svetlana Velmar-Janković is the best known female novelist in Serbia today.

Andrić's novel The Bridge on the Drina won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961.

Milorad Pavić is perhaps the most widely acclaimed Serbian author today, most notably for his Dictionary of the Khazars (Хазарски речник/Hazarski Rečnik), which has been translated into 24 languages.

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Famous quotes containing the word literature:

    “If Steam has done nothing else, it has at least added a whole new Species to English Literature ... the booklets—the little thrilling romances, where the Murder comes at page fifteen, and the Wedding at page forty—surely they are due to Steam?”
    “And when we travel by electricity—if I may venture to develop your theory—we shall have leaflets instead of booklets, and the Murder and the Wedding will come on the same page.”
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    Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad.
    Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.
    Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)