Many people have contributed in various ways to the making of this volume. The first to be mentioned is Joep Leerssen: since the very beginning, he has engaged in scholarly discussions on national poets and cultural saints and has been instrumental in bringing together skilled scholars from different countries to work on this topic. Together with Marijan Dović, he organized the conference Canonization of “Cultural Saints”: Commemorative Cults of Artists and Nation-Building in Europe (University of Amsterdam, October 28th–30th, 2015), an exciting gathering, hosted by SPIN (the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms), that served as a point of departure for this collection of essays. We are exceptionally pleased to be able to open the discussion with his insightful study.
Our sincere thanks also go to our colleagues Marko Juvan and Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson. Both of them have been part of this project since the beginning of our common efforts to conduct research on cultural saints, their cults, and canonization – and we are grateful that they responded to our invitation and wrote the Preface for Great Immortality. Furthermore, we are thankful to Donald F. Reindl for copyediting the manuscript, the editorial staff at Brill, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable remarks. A number of individuals assisted us in acquiring the illustrations and resolving copyright issues, thus making this volume rich with informative images. In this respect, our special thanks go to Carme Torrents Buxó from the Jacint Verdaguer Foundation, Folgueroles, for providing us with the cover illustration. The image of a bronze Jacint Verdaguer, the Catalan national poet, contemplating the sublime mountaintop sunset in the sacred grounds of the sanctuary at Mare de Déu del Mont, is symbolic for the ideas about “great immortality” and cultural sainthood widely discussed in this volume.
Several chapters (those written by Alenka Koron, Andraž Jež, Bojan Baskar, Luka Vidmar, and Jernej Habjan) were first published in Slovenian, in the volume Kulturni svetniki in kanonizacija (Cultural Saints and Canonization, Založba ZRC, ZRC SAZU, 2016, edited by Marijan Dović); they were expanded, revised, and translated into English for this edition with the permission of the publisher. Finally, we would like to acknowledge that the research was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency (project J6-6846, “National Poets and Cultural Saints of Europe: Commemorative Cults, Canonization, and Cultural Memory”, 2014–2017) and the University of Iceland Science Fund.
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We dedicate Great Immortality to John Neubauer, a prominent scholar and a great colleague whose work on national poets profoundly inspired our approach. John was among the planned contributors to the volume, but it was just shortly before the Amsterdam conference that he sadly passed away.
Marijan Dović
ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies
Jón Karl Helgason
University of Iceland
Ljubljana and Reykjavík, February 8th, 2019