The Generic Composition of Marulić\u27s Lyric Oeuvre

This paper endeavours to determine the generic types of Marulić’s short poems. At the beginning the methodological premises for the understanding of the verse compositions written at the watershed of the Middle Ages and the Modern Age are set out, that is, the relationship between lyric and didactic genres is analysed. After that several of Marulić’s poems are analysed from the point of view of their structures in terms of genre and kind, their generic features are described and defined. In a large number of his shorter poems Marulić relied on Biblical or Classical poetry, then on the poetics of Croatian medieval writing, and on the structural components of Italian and medieval Latin writing. For this reason poetic and generic syncretism characterises Marulić’s poetry written in Croatian. Marulić’s Croatian poetry shows that the concept of the lyrical incorporated into the body of his shorter rhymed compositions is different from the understanding of that kind today. While the concept of the epic in his oeuvre is set out very clearly and thoroughly in line with the classical concept of the idea, the short poems in his works are built upon a number of generic traditions and thus give rise to very diverse lyric models. Finally, following the typology of the lyric suggested by H. Markiewicz and Cz. Zgorzelski, Marulić’s short poems are classified. The following lyrical models are described and set apart as the dominant types in Marulić’s works: 1) the lyric appeal and 2) the lyric portrayal, with the subtypes of a) the lyric narrative and b) the lyric dialogue