The literary system is one of the main concepts of Empirical Literary Science and describes literature as a social phenomenon, conceived by four agency roles, namely production or creation, distribution, reception and processing. In this thesis, we are particularly interested in the penultimate and, indirectly, in the second role, since in our attempt to reconstruct the life of the Slovenian book in the Slovenian National Library in Cleveland, we have drawn from the accessible archival material of the Library, with borrowing cards being the main source of data. Through them, we have analysed the reception and, in parallel, the distribution of the Slovenian book among Slovenian emigrants in Cleveland. As the performance of individuals entering different agency roles is affected by many individual and societal factors, the reasons for Slovene emigration to America, characteristics of Slovene population in Cleveland and the history of Slovenian National Library were investigated. Parallel was also made with Reading Rooms on Slovene territory. In the empirical part of the thesis, we analysed 615 borrowings based on 306 borrowing cards, focusing on a group of Slovenian authors who had already attracted our attention during the review of the material. We monitored the life of their books and their reception in the Slovenian community in Cleveland between 1931 and 2001. Based on the borrowing cards, we found out, among other things, that their borrowing was characterised by three waves. The first took place between 1947 and 1951, the second lasted from 1962 to 1973 and the third from 1976 or 1978 to 1986. If we drew conclusions from the frequency of borrowing, which is a good indicator of the topicality of an author or his literature, we could say that Fran Saleški Finžgar and his novel Pod svobodnim soncem was borrowed the most during the whole period.
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