This thesis is a historical and critical analysis of the fiction of Viktor Car Emin (1870-1963), a Croatian writer, who started writing in the period of Croatian national revival in Istria and continued all through the fifties of this century. His work, which consists of 11 novels, 140 short stories and 3 plays, can be divided into three distinct periods. The first period (1888-1917) is characterised by Car’s involvement in the problems that the Croats of Istria were encountering at the time, and his struggle for the maintenance of the national identity. His short stories focus on several thematic issues, the major ones being retired sailors, teachers and people from the fringes of society. A dozen best short stories from this period were published in the collection The Old People (1917). They invariably describe the common people that were ill-treated by life, social or even political circumstances. Through an array of losers the author portrays the region between Rijeka and Brseč, the setting of all his works. Apart from short prose works, he published a trilogy of Istrian novels: Deserted Hearth (1900), Dried up Spring (1903) and After the Tide (1913), the last of which outclasses the others by its quality, as well as the novel New Battles (1908), which remained in periodicals, and the play Winter Sun (1903). Car’s second period (1918-1941/45), a fairly productive one as well, is thematically a continuation of the former. His short stories from seamen’s life and historical novels of the time - Intersected Paths (1938) and Sister Aurora Veronika (1940) - are among his best writings, quite unlike his very first historical novel Under Suspicion (1918) or novels with contemporary topics (Our Mare, 1913, Between two Hearths, 1934, The Sea Knight, 1939), which by their plot and treatment of subject matter made no shift in quality. Throughout this period Car remains tendentious, utilitarian and didactic in his orientation, unable to distance himself from the problems that haunted his Istria. He also wrote the play Vicencica (1934), the best of all his dramatic production. The third period (1946-1963) is marked by Danunciade - a fictionalised Chroni-history of Rijeka’s Tragicomedy 1919-1921 and Car’s departure from the traditional, as well as his own, cliché, which resulted in a markedly different work from anything preceding it. Car’s approach and narrative technique are now modern and as such represent a novelty of genre and stand at the beginnings of our post-modern narrative prose. His autobiographic writings, in particular his Autobiography (1949) and Diary (1951), are also worth mentioning for the more modern approach. The play On Sentry Duty was also published in this period (1946), although it thematically belongs to the second period, as it was performed on stage in 1923. Car deserves to be remembered for introducing in literature the autochtonous characters of the Croatian Littoral - Istria and Rijeka, and for highlighting the existential problems of the region. He can be regarded as a regional writer and an asynchronic literary figure, with regard to the predominant literary currents in Croatian literature, but by no means an anachronistic one. His weakness - indeed his asynchronism - lies in the fact that he did not evolve beyond the romantic literary techniques, outdated phrase, uninventive language and style that are more characteristic of the 19th century than of the present one.