History, Politics and Wars in Croatian Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Epic : An Overview

History, politics, and war are three interrelated themes of early modern epics. This article analyzes their articulation in eight longer Croatian epic texts, two of which were written in the sixteenth and six in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Special attention is paid to the relationship to the classical epic tradition (Virgilian, i.e. Tassian), to the degree of emancipation of the political theme from Christian morality, to the inscribed identification value statements and to the (social) functions of the analyzed epic texts.