August Šenoa

Šenoa's contributions to Croatian literature are often considered peerless; he is called the "father of the Croatian novel" and of Croatian realism. The short period in which he wrote his oeuvre is even called the "Šenoan Age" (Croatian: Šenoino doba). His novels and plays have been framed as embodying the Volksgeist of the era and leaving behind the traditional view of Croatia's precarious position at the center of the crossroads of Europe, flanked by the Orthodox East and Ottoman Turks to the south, leaving Croatia to "[pin] all her hopes upon the House of Habsburg". Rather, he paints the Austro-Hungarian Empire as an enticing Western woman. Tatiana Kuzmic, a professor of the South Slavic languages at Harvard University, notes the following about this characterization:

The adulterous woman of Šenoa's novel [The Goldsmith's Gold], however, fits the mold very well. [...] As a semicolony inhabiting what was perceived by the West as the border between civilization and barbarism, between Christianity and Islam, and eager to prove that it belonged to the former, nineteenth-century Croatia, as Šenoa shows, was particularly vulnerable to the charms of "the deceiving beauty" that was Austria.

His work advocated deeply for a national unity across Yugoslavia by appealing to the shared characteristics rather than their differences. He compared the five Yugoslav peoples – Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and Montenegrins – to the five fingers of a single hand and appealed his Yugoslavism to the public through common "blood enemies".

Šenoa wrote his novels as distant historical fiction, as critiquing the current political situation could have proved dangerous and opened himself to censorship; both The Goldsmith's Treasure and The Peasant Revolt take place in the 16th century. In an 1874 issue of Vienac, he wrote:

In the historical novel, you must use the analogy between the past and the present to bring the people to an awareness of itself. There are a hundred opportunities for this. In vain is the boasting of the forefathers, the bloody glory of the times gone by is not the task of our historical novel. One must depict all the sins, all the virtues of our past, in order to enable the people to guard from sin, follow virtue. Cicero's saying: Historia vitae magistra—will not find a better place than in the history of the Croats and Serbs.

In his novels, he fused national romanticism characterized by buoyant and inventive language with realistic depictions of the growth of the petite bourgeois class.

His work is known for Cecildemillean scenes and poetic description of oppressed Croatian peasantry and nobility struggling against foreign rule (Venetians, Austrians/Germans and Hungarians) and romanticized period from the 15th to the 18th century. Šenoa is often credited with "creating the Croatian reading public".