Uroš Petrović, the Theorist and Literary Critic

Abstract

The paper studies the literary critical works of Uroš Petrović, the early 20th-century Serbian theoretician and literary critic. Through a comprehensive review of his literary activity, this paper explains Petrović’s general critical principles, while underlining theoretical and methodological assumptions and foreign models he employed (the influence of French authors). It interprets concrete texts on works of Serbian and foreign literature, while special attention is also paid to Petrović’s theatre criticism, with Petrović’s metacritique also being considered at the end.
His more extensive theoretical and critical essays represent comprehensive elaborations of a selected literary theme or theoretical model, intended to be as instructive as possible to readers, and his critical analyses and reviews are concise statements of individual, often less notable literary and scientific achievements from local or foreign literatures. The same applies when he writes about specific authors. His point of view is frequently moralistic, in the spirit of the French tradition that inspired him, but his tone is never arrogant.
Petrović’s literary criticism represents a combination of intuition and intellect: a combination of the subjective response of the reader and the objective, previously adopted theoretical criteria about the meaning, form, and cultural-historical function of literary works of art. From a distance of more than a century, we consider the contribution of Uroš Petrović to the development of Serbian literary criticism to be more significant than it has seemed until now.