Nova Istra

136 NOVA ISTRA Literary, Art and Cultural Journal Zeitschrift für Literatur, Kunst und Kultur Rivista di letteratura, arte e cultura Pula, Croatia / Kroatien / Croazia, No. 1/2019 Regionalism in the Croatian Literature in the Past and Present Summary: The Croatian literature is continuous, being the art of written word with no in- terruption, which encompasses all the style- and history-based periods as any other relevant and ‘greater’ European literature does – from the early Middle Ages to the Glagolitic epigraphics (inscriptions in stone) until postmodernism or whatever we shall call the time in which we are actually living now. Therefore, our literature is one of the most continuous literatures in the Old Continent. A foreigner, but also many domestic people, should be told, reminded and con- stantly encouraged to remember that the state area and the homeland area are not the same terms, they are not equal, since the latter refers to all the historical (in our case) Croatian lands or provinces where – for centuries, i.e. one thousand and five hundred years, even longer, since our ancestors came here during the great move- ments of peoples – the Croatian political and state-administrative power has re- ached, along with the Croatian culture, etiquette, language, script, general tradition and the features determining the identity of the Croatian man and nation, which is even more important. The homeland area in the Croatian case is thus much wider, bigger than the state area, today including the Republic of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, large parts of Vojvodina (now in Serbia) – esp. entire Srijem and considerable parts of Bačka, then Boka kotorska (now in Montenegro), etc. Starting particularly from the written and spoken practice during the Croati- an Middle Ages, it is generally well-known that we have three languages and three scripts, in other words, the Old Slavic, Latin and Croatian languages, along with the Glagolitic, Croatian Cyrillic and Latin scripts. The disintegration of the Croatian national area in the south-eastern part of Eu- rope, in a turbulent but also a stimulating area where the Mediterranean meets the Middle Europe, and the Balkans on the outskirts, once in the past interrupted/ abolished sovereignty (when the so-called rulers, Croatian princes and kings in the