Topos Waters in Newer Bosnian Literature

Abstract

Water, whether in a concrete or abstract sense, has an irreplaceable role in every culture and literary tradition in Bosnia and Herzegovina – from the elementary essential-biological to the ambient and psychological in the representations of space and people. This paper will, through concrete examples, examine the role of water topos in works of Bosnian literature precisely through these segments. The theoretical part indicates what the water topos represents, and the interpretive part sees water as a motif and symbol in the structure of the literary text and emphasizes the inscription of factional geographical toponyms/hydronyms, as well as fictitious abstract (a) topos in the poetic identities of the text (and opus in its entirety). In all this, we try to prove the hypothesis that water is an identifying determinant of a certain space and time, and in the cognitive-identity sense an important marker of cultures, social communities, and individuals.