The article presents the Swiss author Isabelle de Montolieu’s reworking of Johann David Wyss’ Der schweizerische Robinson (1812/1813). The reworking consists of a translation to French in 1814, and a sequel to the work in 1824, both highly popular in the nineteenth century in France, and translated to English in both Britain and the United States. The article examines Montolieu’s negotiation of gender into the robinsonade genre, usually conceptualized as male, as well as the reception of her work. While Wyss’ work in the last decades has witnessed renewed scholarly interest, Montolieu is met with misunderstanding, reluctance, and negligence. The article discusses how gender is at stake in attempts to (re‑)canonize both Wyss’ book and the robinsonade genre at the detriment of Montolieu, and how this is related to questions of aesthetics and popularity.

The paper offers an overview of the poems written by the women poets of the old Dubrovnik. It points to the specific social and cultural context which marked their position in Dubrovnik from the 16^th till the 18^th century and foregrounded certain poetic forms, genres and styles.

The poems of a blind woman from Grgurevci, some of the best poems Vuk Karadžić published in Vienna in 1845, are included in the literary and national canon to the greatest extent. The most famous details from her opus – Lazar’s choice of the Kingdom of Heaven and the image of Kosovka devojka (Kosovo Maiden) giving wine to the wounded from the golden goblet after the battle – are exclusive in epic corpus and remembered thanks to exceptional variations of this performer. Therefore, her contribution to cultural heritage is almost immeasurable. Nevertheless, these motives will not be (primarily) studied as elements of individual poetics because: 1) there is no way to determine if Slepa from Grgurevci (The Blind Woman from Grgurevci) introduced the motives herself or assumed them from one of her antecedents, and 2) oral literature is essentially supra-individual. Slepa from Grgurevci is a striking example of a much used practice of oral poets who transferred different and sometimes contradictory layers of tradition and relied on old formulas and plot patterns, while crossing numerous tradition branches.The analysis of the above mentioned motives in wider epic and Indo-European context will reveal great tension between these layers of tradition, as well as their position and semantic.

The paper analyses the first book of Eustahia Arsić, the first Serbian woman of letters of the modern age. Even though some parts of Sovjet maternij (1814) are addressed exclusively to women readers, her approach is universal and more emancipatory than feminist. The book has a recognizable hybrid structure, well known since Dositej Obradović's autobiography and maintained during the 19th century. Essayistic discourse about the Enlightenment subjects of interest (education and character building in the terms of ideas deriving from Rousseau’s philosophy) is combined with four poems. These poems appear as the standard examples of sentimentalism in Serbian poetry, but they are also early examples of texts formulating the motive of the Supreme Creator eternally present in the course of “life” of nature and universe. In that way, her work appears as the anticipation of the distinctive feature of the Serbian 19th century poetry.

This paper analyzes various apologetic strategies used by Milica Stojadinović, the Serbian woman, in her diary entitled In Fruška Gora in 1854. The paper is focused on the defense discourses which aim at convincing the Serbian public that female authorship is not damaging but beneficial for the national struggle. By presenting herself as a sincere patriot and an exemplary Serbian woman, devoted not only to doing chores and other female duties, but also to writing poetry, reading mythological and philosophical books, translating European literature and collecting Serbian folk poetry and tales, Milica Stojadinović was trying to clear her reputation as an eccentric and false poetess, and to convince the Serbian people in the dignity and the importance of her role as the national poetess. The paper emphasizes her pleads for woman’s right to acquire a thorough education, to chose to become a woman writer, and to express herself in a creative way.

Draga Dejanović’s poetry, next to Milica Stojadinović Srpkinja’s verses, is one of the sources of the modern Serbian female poetry. Her poetic word is rebellious, sensual, passionate, playful. She extolled the female eroticism and pleasure in her poetry and defied the patriarchal social conventions by debating erotic taboos and caricatures which were present in the folklore heritage and handwritten songbooks of the 18th and the 19th century. She anticipated modernist iconoclasm by echoing female poetic voices.

A play based on the novel Nove (The New Women) by Jelena Dimitrijević.

The paper aims to reconstruct the emergence of female discourse which is focused on camps for Informbiro adherents. These female testimonies were excluded from mainstream history and literature because, on the one hand, the issue of Goli otok Camp (Barren Island Camp) was a taboo issue, and, on the other hand, because of the dominance of the male narratives. The subordination and, moreover, the nonexistence of mainstream female memoirs persisted until Danilo Kiš got interested in women’s prison camp experience. Documentary series Goli život (Barren life) was filmed on his initiative in 1989. Danilo Kiš also inspired Ženi Lebl to write down her own history. That was the first camp testimony published by a woman (Ljubičica bela. Vic dug dve i po godine 1990/ The White Violet. Two and a half year long joke). A recent study showed that another camp prisoner, Milka Žicina, was writing about her camp experience during the 1970s, but was hiding the manuscript in fear of repression. Her texts were published posthumously in the journals Dnevnik (1993) and Letopis Matice srpske (1998).

This article is an analysis of the first novel written by British author Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918). Despite the popularity and high appreciation she enjoyed during her lifetime, Rebecca West simply disappeared from the modernist canon. Her first novel has very visible modernist traits, contemporary topic and interesting narration methods, and therefore truly deserves a new reading audience.

First critical writings by Rebecca West appeared in the magazine The Freewoman. A Weekly Feminist Review in the period 1911–1912. Her reviews were mainly focused on the contemporary literature. Criterion which Rebecca West used in order to evaluate literary works and distinguish “good” from “bad” literature was based on her strong feminist stance. First part of the article broadly discussed concepts of literary criticism and feminist literary criticism as well as the complex relationship between amateur and professional criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century. The second part examined Rebecca West’s early critical writings, in order to explore her position in the history of (feminist) literary criticism.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the manner in which the war itself and its impacts were viewed in the feminist magazine La voz de mujer, by observing the influence of the World War I on the women’s position in Spain. We start from the assumption that the Spain’s neutrality during the entire war influenced the creation of certain distance towards the war, and that the war is not the dominant topic in the magazine, as opposed to the social and economic changes caused indirectly by the World War I in Spain. The first part of this paper describes the social and historical context in which the female magazines appeared during the World War I in Spain. This is followed by the analysis of the three issues of the magazine La voz de la mujer. We interpret the texts by applying the method of the critical discourse analysis.

By positioning the place of illustrated magazine Woman and the World (1925–1941) into the frame of feminist counter-public formed in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes / Yugoslavia, the paper describes the ambivalence in the treatment of women’s emancipation: the ambivalence which is important characteristics of the ideology of moderate bourgeois feminism and of the periodicals which were the expression and constituent of this ideology. The same ambivalence is embodied in its core ideologeme, the modern woman: it defines woman as emancipated in terms of education and public activism but ‘limited’ with marriage, maternity and femininity. However, in particular articles, Woman and the World would accept radical feminist construction of the new woman. Moreover, the semantics of illustrated magazine is by definition complex and ambivalent in respect of fact that visual elements play as important role as textual. The inter-textual relations in magazine increase the possibility of ambivalent (editor’s) encoding and (readers’) decoding of magazine’s meanings. Thus, the meanings of Woman and the World constantly switch between opposing discourses.

The research paper analyzes mechanisms of social and psychical construction of sex difference in The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. It also deals with narrative techniques that heroine uses in order to undermine harmonizing discourse cohesion and questions the analogy between woman's threatened capability and her lack of self-determination power. The phenomena of Single women is being analyzed and observed in psychological, social and linguistic context. Methodological starting point is Lacanian psychoanalyzing theory, more precisely – its revision accomplished by post-Lacanian feministic theorists suggesting transgressive strategies that provide woman's access to herself, her own body, language, and desire. The examples of those strategies are revealed in the field of the novel's structure, language and the transformations that Ann Wolf deals with.

This paper examines whether the standardization of gender-sensitive language is necessary for gender equality in language, and whether the use of gender-sensitive language automatically contributes to more equal male-female relations in the society. It also explores the possibility that the language is only a manifest of social reality, which is why efforts should be directed primarily to making Serbian society less discriminatory and its members more gender-sensitive. The concept of "communities of practice" provides a theoretical framework. The empirical part is a research conducted in a community of practice – the Association of Literary Translators of Serbia – in order to illustrate dominant views on gender-sensitive Serbian language in one part of the Serbian language elite. It is concluded that language activism is a necessary way to stop any elite from creating a discourse that promotes inequality in Serbian society. The linguistic activism will be effective and successful if implemented through everyday use of gender-sensitive language of interested communities of practice, which will lead to changes in discriminatory cultural patterns and ideologies.