The field of digital humanities has been established on an assumption that we live in a world in which no one is the only producer, manager and disseminator of knowledge or culture. Universities are invited to form original digital models (web, blogospheres, digital libraries, etc.) and innovations in these areas. They ought to foster the establishment of a network for production, exchange and dissemination of knowledge. The openness of sources and access is the only principle. Digital humanities encompass: museums, libraries, archives, galleries without walls; democratization of knowledge and culture; the abolition of boundaries between natural and social sciences; intellectual creativity; mix of media; sometimes even digital anarchy and equal evaluation of creative copies and originals. In this article, author first describes advantages and limits of digital humanities, and then points to cyber-feminism, a feminist version of digital humanities, a new techno-culture, as well as opposition to patriarchal academic discourse.

Nurses played dual roles during the First World War. On the one hand, they functioned as witnesses to men’s war, acting as a link between home and front, for example by writing letters on behalf of their patients to families and loved ones at home. On the other hand, they were active participants in the conflict, offering vital medical care, and operating closer to the front than the majority of their sex, which sometimes blurred the line between (male) combatant and (female) civilian. The complex relationship between these roles of passive witness and active participant are often expressed in their writings. This article will consider several accounts of nursing, both published and unpublished, produced during and after the war in France and Britain. It will distinguish between different kinds of women involved in nursing work during the First World War in order to reveal the diversity of experience that existed beneath monolithic cultural myths of ‘the nurse’. It will then explore the tensions evident between the roles of witness and participant as they are revealed in nurses’ accounts. Nurses express a desire both to act as a channel through which male combatant experience can be expressed, and to write into history the voice of a mobilised woman on ‘active service’.

Women in Serbia started organizing themselves as early as the second half of the 19th century. The Society of Jewish Women was founded in 1874 and the Belgrade Society of Women was founded in 1875. The central aims of this society were humanitarian. Soon the members directed their activities towards medicine. In 1876, during the first Serbian-Ottoman War a hospital was founded by the members where the wounded were looked after. The society Princess Ljubica led by Milka Vulović was established in 1899. This society focused on helping the Serbian people in Old Serbia. The society Circle of Serbian Sisters was founded in 1903. Its founders were Nadežda Petrović and Delfa Ivanić. Apart from many humanitarian and educational initiatives and the constant struggle for women’s rights, one of the main objectives of these societies was to train its members for nursing. The first training course was started by the Belgrade Society of Women as early as 1875 and the second was started by the Circle of Serbian Sisters in 1906. Delfa Ivanić later wrote that ”It was a way for Serbian women to voluntarily complete their military service.” Through these courses the societies managed to mobilize ”an army of women” at the beginning of the Balkan Wars – army of mercy, as they were called at the time. Prior to the outbreak of war, women’s societies submitted to the Ministry of Defence a list of 1,500 trained nurses immediately available for the military ambulance.

Just before the WWII the communist organization in Serbia managed to attract support from a large number of women. However, the response and participation of women in the national liberation troops was significant, unexpected and surprising for the leaders of the communist movement. Unlike other parts of Yugoslavia, educated young women, who had already been involved in the communist association, joined the partisan units in Serbia. The lives of those women were threatened because of their orientation. They were motivated by the struggle for freedom, and even though awareness of the promised emancipation was present, it was not a decisive factor. A significant number of women joined the uprising in 1941, but soon after it had been crushed, the majority ended up rejected and undefended. The number of women who were willing to join the troops decreased markedly in 1942. The leaders of the partisans then began to encourage women to take part in the war, breaking the resistance towards their participation in the military. Nevertheless, the number of women among partisans continued to lessen and in 1945 a massive demobilization of women took place. Even though it was short-lived, the participation of women in the partisan units left a significant mark. The acceptance of women into the army served not only as a resource of additional manpower, but also as a confirmation of the communist movement’s prewar support for gender equality.

In the historical, social, political, and artistic documents from WWI, the nameless character of a woman looms over the horrific events, suffering, disease and death like a shadow. In order to define Her contours and reconstruct Her story I have studied the work of women artists who inscribed the experience of the Great War into the literary level. The central place of this women’s archive was given to Draga Jovanović’s short story collection Martyrs and Sinners. Draga Jovanović (1885-1975) was a Serbian writer who graduated from the University of Geneva in 1911. There she won the first prize for the psychodramatic poem “A Night in Venice” (1909). In the first half of the 20th century Jovanović published two novels, No name (1931) and The Case of Vera (1963), two short stories collections Martyrs and Sinners (1937) and Mosaic of Reality and Dreams (1965), a short story “Mother” (1961), a collection of poems Midsummer Night’s Dream (1933) and a play “Autumn Night – Winter Night” (1966). In her works she addressed the problem of motherhood, illegitimate pregnancy in a traditional society, love, disease, and death. In the short story collection Martyrs and Sinners, the once popular and now forgotten writer Draga Jovanović set the framework for describing the female war space in Serbia in 1915, shedding light on life from diferent angles of martyrs and sinners, faced with the horrors of poverty, slavery, famine, and death. The analysis will show that we are faced with a precious artistic testimony of the female side of war, rich in aesthetic value and worthy of entering the literary canon

Ten years passed between the publishing of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), and Mrs Dalloway (1925). In the meantime, The Great War broke out, leaving nothing but unprecedented devastation behind. It is in this atmosphere that Woolf started her literary career, finishing her first novel just before the beginning of what was later to be called the First World War, bearing witness to the immediate pre-war ideology. On the other hand, in her later novels, she was to depict the indellible post-war consequences. One such novel, about the shell-shock effect, was Mrs Dalloway. The idea of this paper is to do a literary research into the pre-war atmosphere, and post-war consequences, depicted in the two novels by Virginia Woolf, аn author also known as a feminist-oriented pacifist. One of her best-known war-affected characters stands out in the world literature of our day – Septimus Warren Smith. It is through this character’s eyes that we are going to experience the horrors of the Great War. 

This paper analyzes the journal of Hélène Berr (Hélène Berr Journal, 1942-1944, Paris, 2008) – a Parisian Jew, and a student at the Sorbonne – which she wrote during two years of war, as a testimony of the conflicted feelings of despair, fear and hope, and her transitions from a helpless victim to a sublime author. The journal starts with a dedication from the book she received from Paul Valéry, and then it continues with quotes from Keats, Gide, Shakespeare, Conrad, Lewis Carroll; notes on the music of Bach and Chopin, the English syntax. This intertextual and palimpsestic text maps subtle steps of growth with the numerous titles it mentions (which are given in a separate list at the end of the edition), quotes, references to musical and artistic works; it maps the road of unearthing the necessity of action lead by cognition – and the determined sacrifices – of the necessity of struggle which will ensure ”the triumph of the desire for happiness over the consciousness of the imminent tragedy” (Modiano). The talented 23-year-old author describes thoroughly and emotionally her personal and family life in Paris under occupation, the growing nacism and antisemitism, working in a Jewish community, but also the intellectual and spiritual world of escape into art and writing. Her worlds are the images of life from both sides of the mirror (Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass was one of her favorite books), where we can notice the intertwining of the portrait of the obedient victim who will be destroyed and the portrait of the disobedient author who triumphs through her own records and thoughts.

This paper deals with the opus of the relatively unexplored writer Vera Obrenović-Delibašić (1906), who participated in the Bosnian Herzegovinian literary life between two world wars by writing mostly poetry and short stories. After the war, she published novels which were focused on people’s uprising and antifascist fight (Kroz Ničiju Zemlju in 1948 and 1959, Višnja iz Ničije Zemlje in 1971), as well as short stories (Zore nad mahalama in 1955). It is precisely this prose and the narrative of revolution and the revolutionary times that this paper will focus on, with the aim of exploring the story of the national liberation struggle through the issue of the emancipatory potential of her stories and the (r) evolutions they represent. The symbolic discourse of reality of a time, an ideology, a culture, society and history is questioned in the paper. The question that is being asked is: Does this prose set in motion, by narrating a revolution, possible scenarios of emancipation of the individual from the patrilinear community which, in its antifascist aims, revolutionises its ways of life? And if so, what models of freedom, truth or justice does it offer when it comes to women’s position in that world? Is there such a representation to be found at all in this prose? In other words: How are models of gender, home, homeland, and freedom represented in the prose of Vera Obrenović-Delibašić when a woman’s name stands next to these formulas of meaning?

This paper analyzes the novel Jasmina Musabegović wrote in 1986. The path of identification through coding female gender means going back home, but only after it has been decontaminated ideologically. Bearing in mind that every topos represents a point in cultural discourse and that rails represent borders and perspectives of gender and cultural prefiguration, what we are interested in is whether Fatima is active in chaotic historical time-space, situated within those transitional topoi (period between the two wars and during WWII); are switches a skeptically colored, failed trope which cannot be transcoded onto female gender, since she lives a life of statics and not a life of changeability, or Fatima’s reversibility towards home tells us about the need for acknowledging the stigmatically and conventionally secondary topologies in authenticating oneself? Is the narrator, disregarding the fragile, but present poly-glossia, imprisoned in her own andro-text, corresponding with the following: what is the position of a woman in collective identification and strong positioning, can a woman be a formalized subject in history, and/or she follows a different path of identity coding through family politics/poly-ethics, togetherness, caring? In other words, doesn’t Switches omit unexpectedly, but intentionally Fatima’s settling down in the historical space, enabling her to preserve her self, without its isolation, but through protecting it in the difference of the marginal, leaving room for the empty (De Certau)?

The literary output of Milka Žicina (1902–1984) had been underestimated by literary scholars for many years, and its interpretation had been limited almost exclusively to the two interwar novels (Kajin put 1934, Devojka za sve 1940), analyzed within the narrow confines of social literature. The chance to reinterpret her output appeared with the publication of the author’s socialist prison forced-labor prose, which is one of artistically outstanding testimonies of the Cominform period. The primary objectives of the article are (1) the analysis of two texts from Žicina’s socialist prison forced-labor prose – Sve, sve, sve... (2002) and Sama (2009), representing the author’s attempts to deal with the difficulties she faced after leaving the forced-labor prison, and (2) the presentation of the strategies – which emerge from the texts – used by the author to cope with the burden of her own experiences both at the time of her isolation and after the end of the punishment.

The paper connects Vuk Karadzic term women’s songs with contemporary gender studies. The fact that oral texts depend on context relativize oppositions male/female in the sense of culture/nature, public/private, mind/body. Some of the folklore genres are dominantly created and transmitted by women. On the other hand, female scientists, during field work, have difficulties writing down man’s texts. Bearing that in mind, it is clear that gender aspect of oral creation, as well as of field work, is important. Heterogeneous oral lyric corpus forms diverse cultural models and confirms cultural heterarchy. Within these models maidens and women are marked by diverse attributes – as obedient and submitted, as well as disobedient and powerful. Special attention is paid to Karadzic's indirect definition of religious sphere as women’s. At the same time, the ritual function, in diverse perspectives, is subversive and confirms the existing order. The ritual masks are observed as a typical example of relativisation of gender identities, especially within the process of ritual inversion.

In the poetry of the contemporary Serbian female poet Marija Knežević (1963) the lyrical voice is expressed in the masculine and feminine gender, while also, at times, identified with all grammatical persons, both in singular and in plural, whereas the relationship between the first and second person singular, as shown in the book entitled Moje drugo ti (2001) is particularly nurtured. The themes of her poetry, which she has been publishing for more than thirty years, encompass all the contents brought about by time, space, history, politics, everyday life: the political, state and economic transitions, wars, emigration, economic crisis, culture (or lack of it), everyday life in the private and public sphere and its reflection in the media. Marija Knežević is a watchful, hypersensitive chronicler of the times. Her open senses, keen spirit and poetic skill manage to symbolically mediate numerous experiences of the world, and the one which stands out the most is precisely the female one. Within the female experience of the world the forms of female literary work and female production are especially accentuated through the use of symbols, metaphors, metonyms, and the frequent use of antiphrasis, paradox and irony. This paper will focus on the entire poetic opus of Marija Knežević, which consists of nine books of poetry: Elegijski saveti Juliji, 1994; Stvari za ličnu upotrebu, 1994; Doba Salome, 1996, Moje drugo ti, 2001; Dvadeset pesama o ljubavi i jedna ljubavna, 2003; In tactum, 2005; Uličarke, 2007; Šen, 2011; Tehnika disanja, 2015.

Bisera Alikadić is one of the key figures both in reconstructing women’s literary history in Bosnian literature as well as in speaking about contemporary literary producion. She cannot be subsumed under ethnonational categories (a Bosnian woman who writes erotic poetry and deals with topics nowhere suitable for the active process of building the nation). Her humour is subversive, emancipative, rebellious, and her position in the literary canon is permanently marginal. Poetically, her counterpart and colloqutor could be the Serbian female poet Radmila Lazić, and it is interesting to compare the poetics of these two autors who write in the same but differently named language – Serbian and Bosnian. Their lyrics demonstrate how humour works in love poetry, and what kind of love their poetry exhibits and affirms.

This paper analyses poetry of the contemporary Bosnian and Herzegovinian poetess Ferida Duraković. The author focuses on the manners in which the articulation of female voice and female experience are used to depict home, homeland, nation, following the tragic outcomes of war devastation, ethnic centrism. Ferida Duraković's poetry opens the question of the role of a woman, poetess, in time of political and ideological turmoil in contemporary Bosnian and Herzegovinian context. Establishing genealogy through the story of the mother is the place from which the lyrical subject articulates the female experience as a place of resistance to the heroic narrative. The lyric subject is a dissident one in the represented political and social context. She offers feminine resistance to any manner of submission, thus criticising the contemporary society. 

The literary transformation of women’s experience springs from antagonistic and ambivalent attitudes towards artistic tradition and artistic practice, since the mediation of women’s experience calls for the reconstruction of those epistemological and interpretative norms and practices related to the making of a literary work. Afraid that her unique experience might be transformed into a cliche, a woman author is always asking the question of relevance – is the experience of a woman’s growing up and reaching maturity important enough to be fictionalized? The subject matter of women’s experience turns into a stumbling block due to awareness that literary tradition lacks a bold and resolute reconsideration of the plots dealing with female life and growth. The paper sets out to explore three novels by women authors released in 2014, discussing the issues of growth and maturity along with the topics of diversity, identity crises within a frame of a fluid text bearing resemblance to fragmentary novel, autobiography and a short story cycle.

Bearing in mind that the analyses of Judita Šalgo’s novel Journey to Birobidzhan typically deal with the vision of a feminist utopia, this study centers on alternative artistic visions (neither male nor female). A less interpreted part of the novel – ”The Original sin of Nenad Mitrov” will be analyzed and show parallels between conclusions that Linda Hutcheon made on poetics of postmodernism and poetics of the novel (implicit and explicit). This paper views the striving for the indefinable and elusive land of Birobidzhan (given through the Jewish myth of homeland) as reinterpretation and destabilization of one of the most common literary motifs – the quest motif. The motif relates to the vision of poetics and art in the postmodern world of the novel that lacks paradigms or coherence.

The aim of this paper is to give an overview of literary works of Virginia Woolf, mostly of her novels and point to the influences and changes that inspired her modernist and feminist thought, resulting in recognition of her as a major female modernist writer of her age. The second part of the paper deals with the issue of androgyny, which is crucial in Woolf's artistic creation and is present in both her novels and her essays. Different critical approaches speak in favour of an androgynous spirit of this modernist writer, emphasizing complexity of her art.

Starting from the idea of language, French post-structuralist feminism separates itself as a specific current in contemporary literary theory during the seventies. This paper aims to present the key theoretical ideas of the French post-structuralist theoretician, Hélène Cixous, given in the essay The Laugh of the Medusa (1975), but also to make an intertextual liaison with her short autobiographical novel Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes (2000). We read the novel as an autopoietic system closely intertwined with the critical thought of the author.

This paper analyzes the reception of Madam de Lafayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves (1678) in the literary criticism of the former Yugoslavia The first part of the paper furnishes general information concerning life and work of the novelist, as well as the translations of her most important novel in Serbo-Croatian. The main part of the work examines in chronological order its critical reception in monographs, prefaces, reviews and scientific articles in literary periodicals since 1912. The results of the research show that the critical responses to the novel are satisfactory in volume and in quality and mainly correspond to the opinion of the French critics, besides the fact that there has been a larger period without critical writings (in the last three decades of the 20th century) and despite the lack of the analyses based on more contemporary critical theories (such as the perspectives of feminist and gynocritical theories, which have existed in foreign literary criticism since the last decade of the twentieth century).

After WWII in Serbia/former Yugoslavia new possibilities opened up for women – they gained voting rights, considerable collective and reproductive rights and institutional support for doing jobs which had been exclusively male up to that point. Even though it was delayed, the feminization of certain professions continued to evolve. The state supported and emphasized the development of science during this period, which enabled a number of women to be the in the frontline of the development of natural sciences. As early as 1946 Dragica Nikolić and Branka Radivojević became the first women who worked as assistant professors of physics at the University of Belgrade. At the Institute for Nuclear Sciences Vinča (founded in 1948) and the Institute for Physics (founded in 1961), women have been present from the very beginning. Some of them, such as Mira Jurić or Branislava Nešković Perović, who was the only woman director of the Vinča Institute (1976-1979), greatly contributed to the development of nuclear physics even at the international level. There are many interesting stories of the women scientists who lived and worked with their professional and personal partners in the modest premises of the Institute. Still, to what extent were they visible outside their laboratories? What do we know about them today? What kind of trace did they leave professionally and publicly? Were they and do they remain invisible?

This paper attempts to describe the life and work of Professor Julka Popović, born Savić (Tübingen 1901 – Belgrade 1985). It tells the story of her parents’ first encounter in Zürich, being born to parents with different nationalities, multicultural and multilingual environment in which she grew up and went to school, specialization in phtysiology, hard times during the war and professional achievements of one of the first women who taught at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade.

The affirmation and promotion of female authorship is one of the basic aspects of emancipatory discourse in the magazine Jugoslavenska žena/Yugoslav woman (1917-1920). The emphasis on the importance and necessity of female self expression and self representation is one of the commonplaces in the program texts. The paradigm of female authorship was exhibited in essays and studies on women writers and in the original literary work. Women’s literature is not subordinated to enlightened and pragmatic objectives of the magazine, but reflects the sensitivity, aesthetic and creative abilities, expressive possibilities and thematic interests of its authors. Poetic pluralism (the realist, symbolist, romantic, expressionist tendencies) is an innovation that brings the magazine in relation to women’s periodicals, pointing out that the concept of modern woman writer includes the construction of personal and independent style and poetic characteristics. This model of woman writer represents another step in the development of female authorship in the context of feministic discursive space and network of communications.

The objective of this paper is to present a comparative analysis of reproductive ideologies in Spain and Serbia, as these are considered important for the construction of gender ideologies. It is also part of the hypothesis that these two countries could be paradigmatic models for socio-cultural system of patriarchy over several centuries, but with two very different social and political developments in the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st century, which, however, have created a very similar social reality. The examined historical moment (from early 20th century until the second half of the same century) covers a period of great turmoil not only in Serbia and Spain, but globally. Reproductive policies are chosen as the object of analysis because they are considered an important element of gender ideologies and, therefore, potentially decisive for the emancipation of women.

There are various answers to the question whether gender equality has been achieved in contemporary Serbian society. Some consider women to be absolutely equal, others think that the achieved equality has been lost; there are those who believe that it never existed and that it will be a long time before it is achieved. What could be the stubborn fact which would help us determine what the plausible answer is? Assuming that the presence of women in daily and weekly press reflects their social position, we shall attempt to discover how much and in what way women are present in Serbian papers. The research relies on corpus and computational linguistics and extraction of information. The analysis will be based on a corpus consisting of portions taken from daily papers and electronic media (Politika, Blic, Večernje novosti, Danas, B92) which have more than 600.000 words (collected 2009-2014) and a smaller extract from weekly press (Ilustrovana poltika, Bazar). The methods of computational linguistics will employ a comprehensive dictionary of the Serbian language and the extraction of information will be based on detecting the named entities with the help of grammars for shallow syntactic analysis. After evaluation, the obtained results will be examined in terms of quality and quantity.