Abby Leach (1855-1918) was a seminal figure in American education. A pioneer in women’s higher education, she persuaded professors at Harvard to deliver their lectures to girls assembled in “The Annex” in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The Annex” eventually became Radcliffe College. Leach went on to become a professor of Classics at Vassar, where she played a leading role in developing curriculum for women’s colleges at their formative stage, and she was the first woman president of the American Philological Association. The basic data about Abby Leach are presented in the Database of Classical Scholarship, a project of the Society for Classical Studies, housed at the University of South Carolina.

Referring to contemporary theories of citation, as well as to certain poststructuralist theories of intertextuality (Kristeva, Barthes), and especially to distinctive marks of transtextuality which were given by Genette, this paper examines the role and the function of biblical citations in the travels Seven Seas and Three Oceans by Serbian author Jelena Dimitrijević. The paper points to the paratextual aspects and the intertextual connections of the travels with the Bible as well as with Lamartine's Travel to East. A prompt evocation of relevant passages from the Bible, which follow the chronology of author's visits to holy places in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, provides an authentic referential illusion for the readers, an effect of a truthful, vital and dramatic experience. The historical discourse blends into the biblical one, the past blends with the presence, the sensuous eyes nurture the spiritual ones, triumphing in the religious trance and the power of imagination. Finally, the paper shows how a mosaic of biblical citations and references, which Jelena Dimitrijević refigures in her travels, integrates completely in the illustrative type of citation which represents the family, national and cultural tradition.

This comparison of a short story by Virginia Woolf, ”Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street”, and Letters from Salonica as well as the novel Nove by Jelena Dimitrijević, points to the extent in which the great turmoils such as World War One, or some other wars and revolutions of the time, permeate the works written about the seemingly private and secluded lives of women. The same perspective is used for comparative analysis of the British and the Balkan modernistic representations of masculinity. The paper aims not only at making connections between these two parts of Europe, but also at questioning the range of the notion of modernism, which should, as it is argued, include the women's writings written in or about the Balkans.

The essay analyzes the literary and non-literary articles published in the women’s magazine Žena/The Woman during the Balkan Wars and after the First World War. It examines different ways in which the magazine’s contributors described the role of women in those wars. Three key women’s roles are identified: an idealized woman, a nurse and a “delija girl“. The appropriation of the given and prescribed female roles was a crucial step towards women’s emancipation. After the First World War women demanded their political rights based on the fact that they had participated in the war and undertook all men’s work while men were in the battlefield.

This paper analyzes the war prose by Milica Jankovic and Isidora Sekulic: collections of short stories Unknown Heroes [Neznani junaci] and Waiting [Čekanje], and From the Past [Iz prošlosti]. These collections were written during the wars (1912 –1918) and published shortly after the end of the First World War. The paper points to the social climate and the major ideas that prevailed in the public opinion. The first part of this paper analyzes the war edition of the journal Women [Žena], which is taken as an example magazine with emancipatory feminist tendencies, and the war edition of the Serbian Literary Gazette [Srpski književni glasnik], which is chosen as the main literary magazine of that time. After mapping the concept of war editions of these magazines, this paper analyzes the war prose of selected female authors. It highlights the specific poetics of Milica Janković and Isidora Sekulić, as well as the differences between them.

The paper presents life stories of the two greatest women physicists – Marie Sklodowska Curie, a Polish physicist and the only woman double Nobel Prize laureate, and Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jew physicist, from whom the Nobel Prize was unjustly withheld. The events, dreams and memories of these two women, pacifists and scientists, during an imaginary but likely to happen night spent at the frontline during the First World War, are presented in parallel with the events and their professional encounters in real life. Paradoxically, the scientific discoveries of Marie Curie and Lise Meitner, two sincere believers in the possibility of human understanding and peace, enabled the construction of the most terrifying weapon world was ever faced with – the atomic bomb.

The article describes the process of three symbolic chartings of an influential book by Rebecca West Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. A Journey through Yugoslavia. The first, anti-colonial charting of the book took place in Great Britain and the USA in 1941/42 (during World War Two), following its publication. The second charting took place in the Western countries during the secession wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, from the colonial point of view. The third charting is only to be expected given the publication of an integrated translation of West’s book into Serbian in 2004. The envisioned process of a new, post-colonial reading of her text from the position of different post-Yugoslav nations could be intellectually and politically reinvigorating one.

A Note on the Treatment

The idea that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West’s voluminous travel (and not just travel) book, could provide an exciting starting point for a TV series, dates back to 1988/9, when some fragments from this book, translated by my father, Nikola Koljevic, were published in the Književne novine review. The Chief Director of Televizija Sarajevo, Slobodan Terzic, was interested in initiating this project as a coproduction between JRT and BBC. The negotiations did not go far, apart from a meeting I had with the editors at BBC in 1989, during the summer that I (then still a student of dramaturgy) spent in London working illegally as a cook in a restaurant. In these circumstances, which were soon about to change, in our country at least, a project of this scope could not be carried out.

In the middle of the nineties – when Rebecca West’s book gained new, global, popularity – Terzic, now Head of Drama Programmes at Televizija Beograd, contacted me again, with a proposal to reinitiate the co-production, but it nevertheless remained too ambitious for TV Beograd's logistic and other capacities.

This treatment was written in 2010, in English, when the third, and so far the most resolute, initiative to realize this film was put forward. The producer Gabriela Tana, who was, at the time, producing Ralph Finnes' film Coriolanus in Belgrade, became intersted in the project through Terzic and An

đelka Vlaisavljevic.

Gabriela Tana managed to obtain (for a limited period only) the rights for a screen adaptation of the book, and hired me to write a treatment for it. Her plan was to get either the BBC or Channel 4 interested in doing a mini series or a film... For now, that's the end of the story about this project. Maybe some day the story will continue.

In writing this treatment, I used, apart from the book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the excellent biography of Rebecca West, written by Victoria Glendinning, as well as diverse sources on Stanislav Vinaver (her guide Constantine in the book) and the Yugoslav literary, social and political scene of the time.

The role of women in the medieval Serbia was indeed remarkable. They were engaged in cultural and spiritual activities and took active part in public affairs and political negotiations. They also appeared as female rulers and creators of literary works and took part in cultural events. Some of the women from the ruling and aristocratic families had books translated and transcribed for them, they ordered icons, had churches and monasteries built and oversaw their decoration. The field in which women excelled particularly in the Middle Ages was creative church embroidery. Many important embroidery pieces have been preserved as valuable art works created by women.
However, in spite of the obvious interest, a complete study about the women’s role in different fields of creativity in the Middle Ages has not been written yet. This review, dedicated to listing of some of their activities, is conceived as a small contribution in this direction. It indicates the activity of the most important medieval women: Queen Jelena of Anjou, Empress Jelena, Duchess Milica, Jephimia the Nun, Jelena Balšić, and Angelina Branković.

In the second half of the 19th century significant socio-economic changes occurred in the whole Europe as a result of the bourgeois revolution. The need for change in lifestyle was also present in the Balkans and it was followed by a period of social modernization and emancipation in various fields. This paper focuses on the status of women and their role in a social change in the Serbian majority community, as well as in the minority Sephardic community in Serbia. The paper presents three theses which authors verify through theoretical study: that both Serbian and Sephardic women took an active part in the modernization of Serbian society, entering new roles and fighting for liberation from patriarchal constraints and thereby contributing to the emancipation and more equal position of women in society; that the emancipation was only partially achieved – Serbian and Sephardic women did gain more rights in certain areas of life, but patriarchal ideas and subordination of women were still dominanant; and that the lifestyle of Jewish women was not much different from the lifestyle of Serbian women because of similar social patterns which shaped their lives over history and made the process of their emancipation quite similar, except for the fact that there were additional obstacles that Sephardic women had to overcome in the process of emancipation.

The aim of this paper is to provide a chronological overview of the most prominent women writers in Turkish literature starting from the 15th century till nowadays, with a particular review of characteristics of each period of the development which Turkish literature has gone through from the time of classical divan literature in the Ottoman Empire to the contemporary Turkish literature.

The paper interprets performance and theoretical works of Maga Magazinović from the perspective of cultural studies, i.e., ideological criticism and feminist theories. It starts from the global context in which her modern dance was formed, and then it construes three narratives as interpretative frames. The first narrative deals with her work as an example of transnational idea of absolute dance. The second one deals with her work within the framework of cultural feminism and of construction of female choreographic and dance subject, as well as the imagined community of female performers and audience. The third narrative deals with physical culture and modern dance, and with its theoretical explications as discoursive techniques of performing national Yugoslav identity as singular as well as plural at the same time. This interpretation is based on contemporary world-system theories, in which the cultures are divided into core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral. As a result, the paper is focused on the way global cultural models are realized in local semi-peripheral system of Serbian and Yugoslav bourgeous culture. 

The paper offers a „close reading“ of close relations performed by Marina Abramović and Ulay in the Relation Work pieces. It interprets the performers' exploration of intersubjectivity during their twelve-year relationship which was both artistic and personal, and explores how they managed to translate the love discourse into visual, tactile, and multimodal metaphors that were related to androgyny, as well as to Eros and Narcissus myths. The essay is focused on the presented love relations which have transcended the male/female antagonism and emphasized both partners’ consent to subjugate their own subjectivity to androgynous intersubjectivity and unity. It analyzes the performed endurance trials such as Relation in Time, in which the artists attempted to maintain the external androgynous unity which they achieved through their heads joined by their hair plaited together; Breathing In/Breathing Out, in which they kept on ’kissing’, even though it compelled them to suffocate each other, because the exchanged air enabled them to form a connection on an internal and visceral level; and Balance Proof, in which they tried to use the sense of touch to overpower the narcissistic self-regards. The paper relates the performed non-verbal metaphors to Paul Ricoeur's notion of métaphore vive, Charles Forceville’s concept of multimodal metaphor, Julia Kristeva's semiotics of histoires d'amour, and Mikhail Epstein's philosophy of the body. In addition, the essay analyzes various sign systems and perception modes, especially the sense of touch as the prime proximity sense and the most interactive mode of perception.

The paper interprets the media construction of a new gender model of woman in Serbia as a consequence of a change of dominant national ideology. An example is found in a talk show “Women” and the analysis is focused both on the traditional elements of the genre (its unbreakable connection to the idea of femininity and female public) and on the novelties which this particular talk show produces.