Irony and sentiment in the literary field: Prešeren’s sonnets and the Slovenian alphabet-censorship war

Abstract

Abstract Restoration censorship forced European Romantic literature to retreat from society and politics into subjective intimacy, fantasy, mythology, history, and exotic places. In addition to conforming to restrictions, however, censorship also led writers to evade its control (pseudonyms, publication abroad, allusive style) and, more rarely, to overt or covert rebellion (petitions, satire, etc.). An example of this is the German sonnets written by the Slovenian romanticist France Prešeren in the mid-1830s as a poetic response to the public controversy over the cultural strategies of national revival (the so-called Slovenian ABC war) and the behind-the-scenes struggles over the censorship of the poetry almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee). With their illocutionary force, Prešeren’s sonnets are directed against prominent collaborators of censorship and the centers of ecclesiastical and secular power that wanted to keep the embrionic Slovenian literary field under their control. These poems move between satirical irony and sentiment, between the fictional suspension of dominant positions in the field and the search for sympathy for the depressing lack of consecration. The satire against the censors of his elegy dedicated to Matija Čop stands out with its acrostic and the affect of rage.