Institute of Slovak Literature

The major focus of the Institute of Slovak Literature, as a scientific institution active in the field of social sciences aiming at a research of a part of the national culture, is on exploration and analysis of the history of Slovak literature from its formation and origin until the present. Literary and historical research is grounded in methodology of literary science, historiography and other social sciences (in particular aesthetics, philosophy, semiotics) within the scope of the interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity and in the full range of traditional and current methodological and theoretical approaches, schools and movements, whereas methodological explicitness is a means of a systematic grasping of knowledge in its theoretical, literary-historical and cultural historical dimension.

In this sense, the scientific output of this workplace ranges from monographic processing of individual authors’ work through grasping the entire literary movements and selected periods of time up to formulating theoretical basis of literary canons and poetological and genealogical issues.The Institute purposely strives to acquire a position of a national research basis. Besides the key literary history sphere and systematic activities in the sphere of current literary criticism the Institute gradually intensifies its research interest in the field of literary theory. This ambition also corresponds with organisational structure of the Institute, which consists of basic literary-historical research departments (History of Earlier Slovak Literature Department, History of 19th Century Slovak Literature Department and Research of the 20th Century Slovak Literature Department) and two courses enabling scientific discussion also on literary theory and literary criticism. The Institute publishes a scientific periodical called Slovak Literature – Journal for Literary Science, which has been issued six times a year since 1954. Since 2005 the Institute, in co-operation with Kalligram Publishing Company, has been issuing a presentable reader’s publication of the of Slovak literature classics’ works called Library of the Slovak Literature.