Nova Istra

137 early Middle Ages ruled), then a century-long exhausting fights for mere survival and salvation, entire history of withdrawals (it is just enough to see the geographical configuration of contemporary Croatia, quite unnatural!), reducing to the so-called remnants of the remaining parts of the Croatian lands in the late 16 th century – re- liquiae reliquiarum olim magni et inclyti regni Croatiae – and various state-and-legal relationships with the others with the aim to maintain the awareness of sovereignty, at least fragile, and the very (not only formal but also real) sovereignty at any cost... all this and beyond this, what is not mentioned, has largely affected the modelling of more than one Croatian, so-called regional mentality and tradition, language expres­ sion, dialectal variety (chakavian, kaikavian, shtokavian)... therefore, regionalism is entirely a natural phenomenon and state also in the field of the Croatian literature, regionalism that is no (more) a centrifugal but centripetal power and phenomenon of the one and unique Croatian literature. Regionalism as an issue has been particularly presented and discussed in the more recent histories of the Croatian literature, as well as in other sources. En- couraged by the longevity of this phenomenon so far, at the 14th Pula Essay Days (October 2016), we tried to describe and define regionalism by using the current viewpoints and the newer methods in the science of literature, mostly to consider its aspects in the light of the literature history and review, as it is now and here.The working title was ‘Regionalism in the Croatian Literature in the Past and Present’. This special issue of our journal, let’s say in the form of a book of proceedings, includes the papers presented at the above-mentioned symposium in which exper- ts in literature, i.e. theoreticians, and writers themselves, but also historians, publi­ cists, and others took part. B. D. Biletić, editor-in-chief (Transl. by R. Šamo)