“... for God and Religion, the Emperor and Homeland!” The Culture of Translation and Ideological Control in Slovene Reading Books (1848–1918)

Abstract

School reading books provide a good insight into societies’ self-definition and subject matters prevailing in them in a specific period. In the Habsburg Monarchy, Slovene reading books were supposed to raise the youth as devout Catholics and citizens loyal to the emperor, in short, as “good Slovenes”. These readers contained mainly translations; however, their contribution to the development of a uniform national language has been up to now mostly overlooked in the national emancipatory di- scourse, even though without translations no considerable progress in the formation of a uniform Slovene literary language – an essen- tial basis for the development of a common national identity – would have been possible in the first place.