Imagology was established in mid-twentieth century in French comparative literature as a branch of comparative literary studies that explores literary images of foreign countries and peoples. Critical reception of French comparative literature by the Aachen Program (H. Dyserinck) resulted in the insight of the impossibility of separating the image of the other (heteroimage) from the image of the self (autoimage), as well as of the constructional/representational character of these images. This directed imagology more and more towards researching the forms of representation and the socio-political functions of different identification mechanisms, along with a conscious disregard for their objective information value. Although it still often held on to the attribute 'comparative,' emphasising its supranational character, as well as to the attribute 'literary,' emphasising literature as its fundamental subject matter, imagology also opened itself to non-literary texts and other media, to culture as a whole. Therefore the focus of its research interest has in the broadest sense come to include processes of constructing and transforming cultural imaginaries, that is, the textual, intertextual, and contextual aspects of discursive constructions of autoimages, heteroimages and metaimages (images about others' images of oneself). At the same time, especially in latest research, emphasis is placed on the cognitive and performative dimensions of collective images which are seen as constitutive elements of social and cultural practices, as well as of individual and collective memory. In terms of its cognitive interest and its research methods, a fair number of convergences exist nowadays between imagology and other, more famous albeit younger, research fields/paradigms in contemporary humanities, such as postcolonial studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.

This website was initiated by a group of imagology-oriented historians and historians of literature from the Department of Croatian Language and Literature, the Department of History, and the Centre for Comparative Historical and Intercultural Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. Our aim is to make the results of our imagological research of Croatian literary culture and critical inquiry into traditional imagology, its perspectives and its relation towards related disciplines accessible to the broadest critical public possible. We therefore warmly invite all Croatian and international experts interested in the analysis of identity, ideas, and values in culture to join the project.