In the 19th century, all South Slavic countries under Austro-Hungarian rule underwent a national revival period spearheaded by intellectuals and clergy. Fictional literature played a formative role in establishing and educating reading communities and articulating their national identity. Faced with the prevalence of popular literature in German, Italian, and French, intellectuals in Croatia felt the need to establish a literature in the language of the emerging nation. In order to appeal to the wider (female) public, Mirko Bogović’s journal Neven (1852-58) carried short stories and folk-style narratives Romantically thematizing Ottoman rule and anti-Ottoman resistance. The journal Vienac (1869-1903) focused on publishing short fiction and novels, especially under the editorship of August Šenoa in the 1870s. Šenoa counteracted trivial Romantic productions and advocated a programme of social and psychological realism. His novella Prijan lovro (1873) features a hero caught between his rural background and the demands of modern society. In the subsequent decade, the standard antagonist in the narrative ceased to be the demonic Turk and became increasingly the Western foreigner: Croatian authors wrote extensively of decadent Western customs and femmes fatales threatening innocent young men and corrupting the Croatian national character. In the 1880s, the poetics of realism gave way to naturalism (the Zola-inspired Eugen Kumičić); the stylistic emphasis shifted from evenemential storytelling and didactic or patriotic digression to deeper psychological insights and more evocative description.

In Bosnia, Muslim tales were introduced in the 1860s partly under the influence of Western writers, when the Bosanski vjestnik (1866) was founded in Sarajevo. The Serbian narrative tradition in Bosnia was largely influenced by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and his close associates Sima Milutinović and Luka Georgijević Milovanov. The Bosanska vila (1885-1915) was the longest-lasting journal of Bosnian Serbs, dovetailing literary tales with the register of folklore storytelling, but it also published literary works by major Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian authors outside Bosnia. The Franciscans in Bosnia enthusiastically endorsed the Illyrian movement, spreading from Zagreb, and were encouraged by Ljudevit Gaj to work against Ottoman rule. The journal that spanned two oppressive regimes – Héderváry’s in Croatia and Kallay’s in Bosnia – was Nada (1895-1903), edited by the Croatian poet Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević. Bringing together significant writers of Muslim, Serbian, and Croatian background, it became most notable for its high standard of literary quality.

The cultural heyday of Muslim Bosnia was triggered by the foundation of the Behar (1900) and Gajret (1903) cultural societies and is reflected in the collections of short stories by Ivan Klarić and Mirko Jukić, published between 1906 and 1918. Edhem Mulabdić (Na obali Bosne, “On the shore of Bosnia”, 1900) evoked the everyday life of Muslim villages, focusing on the protagonists’ negotiation of the rapid changes of the modern world. Osman (Aziz) Hadžić’s short stories portray Muslim folk as corrupted by the Western European customs and culture, laziness and luxury, following the Austro-Hungarian takeover, and thematize mass emigration to Turkey under the new Habsburg dispensation. Petar Kočić’s stories S planine i ispod planine (“From and under the mountain”, 1902-05) depict, often satirically, Bosnian peasants threatened by social injustice.

The founding father of Serbian Romantic prose was Bogoboj Atanacković, whose novellas abound in sentimental passages but are free from moralist didacticism. Đura Jakšić’s work forms a parallel to the Neven novellas; in the 1870s, he adopted a satirical narrative mode, which depicted contemporary society rather than celebrating the nation. The role played by August Šenoa in Croatia in promoting realism (with the 1865 manifesto Naša književnost, “Our literature”) was played by Svetozar Marković in Serbia; however, writers did not always endorse his apologia of Serbian patriarchal society. In the 1870s, Serbian authors wrote under the influence of Russian realism and the novella reached its highest flourish. Serbian realist narratives often involve a lyrical or a humorous register, and usually fall into the type of idyllic, the socially critical and satirical, and the psychological. Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers of this period were regularly informed of their neighbours’ literary work through three major magazines: Savremenik, the Srpski književni glasnik, and the Bosanska vila.