Literature
The first literary works written in the region are ten centuries old, and the first Montenegrin book was printed five hundred years ago. The first state-owned printing press (Printing House of Crnojevići), was located in Cetinje in 1494, where the first South Slavic book was printed the same year (Oktoih). A number of medieval manuscripts, dating from the 13th century, are kept in the Montenegrin monasteries.
The coastal Montenegro (called for centuries Venetian Albania) was heavily influenced by Renaissance Italy, mainly in literature. Ludovico Pasquali, Giovanni Bona de Boliris, and Giovanni Polizza were the main representatives in those centuries.
On the substratum of traditional oral folk epic poetry, authors like Petar II Petrović Njegoš have created in the last two centuries their own expression. His epic Gorski Vijenac (The Mountain Wreath), written in the Montenegrin vernacular, presents the central point of the Montenegrin culture, for many surpassing in importance even the Bible.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Montenegro
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“A people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.”
—Edith Hamilton (1867–1963)