At a time when most modern Chinese writers were preoccupied with grand topics such as the revolution, the road to national salvation, and resistance against the Japanese aggression, Zhang Ailing (张爱玲, 1920–1995) deals with seemingly trivial, intimate dilemmas of the Chinese during the Second World War. At the center of her attention are the romantic feelings between men and women, and the complex relations within the patriarchal Chinese family. Her heroines, torn between the traditional moral constrictions and desires of their own, their needs, as well as their self-preservation urge in a patriarchal society faced with tumultuous historical events, are represented without any embellishment. Unlike typical representations of women where the most prominent thing about them is their potential with regard to emancipation and women’s liberties, one of the most important Chinese female writers of the twentieth century presented an image of a modern woman who is aware of her limits and tries to strike a balance between preserving her integrity and making compromises in life. In this article, the analysis of the inner world of modern and urbane female characters in two of Zhang Ailings’s short stories, “Love in a Fallen City” (倾城之恋) and “The Golden Cangue” (金锁记), will point out some of the ways in which Chinese women are trying to throw off the schackles of patriarchal society during the dramatic encounter of tradition and modernity.

The hitherto marginalized peripheral Dalits in India have come up with their own voice to help them assume a central position in literature, and their voice is a voice of protest against their crass marginalization in a caste-ridden society. The most recent offshoot of Dalit literature is the autobiographies of Dalit women who have been subject to a double-edged oppression and exclusion by both the non-Dalit upper-caste people and the Dalit patriarchy. While these autobiographies are unique on more scores than one, they remain as a faithful antenna reflecting the dystopian asphyxiating suffering of Dalit women, and a historical document of it. This essay will try to situate these Dalit autobiographies in the socio-political context of the Indian Dalits, and attempt to identify some of the major trends in them. Finally, by drawing some seminal insights from subaltern studies, this essay will try to substantiate how the Dalit women’s individual voices articulated in these autobiographies repudiate Spivak’s controversial claim that the subalterns cannot speak.

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (1939–2020) is one of Greece’s leading female poetic voices with a work that spans over thirty years. She was also a linguist and an acclaimed translator. Her work is widely read in Greece and it has also received official recognition: it has been awarded the Greek National Poetry Prize in 1985 and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize in 2000. The body, myth and nature but above all language and its ability to convey emotions and experiences are central features of her poetry. This essay discusses Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s poetics with reference to her revision of the character of Penelope in three seminal poems. Her original reworking of the myth shows her knowledge of feminist discourse such as the writing of Adrienne Rich and Hélène Cixous. Above all, it reveals that she was a careful poet-reader. I discuss her affinities with Elisaveta Bagryana’s ‘Penelope of the 20^th Century’ (1934) and, perhaps surprisingly, her dialogue with Wallace Stevens’ brilliant poem ‘The World as Meditation’ (1952). The essay also addresses the wider question of the use of ancient Greek myth in feminist writing and by women poets in Greece.

This paper looks into Romanian critic Monica Lovinescu’s writings in order to identify the criteria she employs for the analysis of Romanian women writers after World War II. Covering mostly fiction and memorialistic literature, Monica Lovinescu played an important role in launching the careers of contemporary women writers, while also revisiting forgotten or marginal texts authored by members of older generations. Her value system brings together aesthetic and ethical frameworks that take into account the larger socio-political context which the writers relate to. Even though the critic’s way of reading is not an explicitly feminist one, her analyses and hermeneutical technique still consider the writer’s gender, especially as she thinks that Romanian women writers were often marginalized by male scholars who dominated the literary field during and after communism.

The paper approaches artistic self-concepts from the perspective of twenty-first-century female writers. Against the background of ancient and modern constellations of the artist and the muse, one main question will concern feminist strategies of coping with this ideal union that has been shaped within a patriarchal tradition of art production for centuries. Slavenka Drakulić, Adisa Bašić, Dijala Hasanbegović, and Lana Bastašić use a variety of subversive strategies to challenge and transform the given constellation. Analysing the difficulties an emancipated modern muse faces when attempting to be recognised as an independent artist is only one possible first step to open this discussion. More active measures proposed in the selected literary examples are to reverse traditional gender roles in love relationships and to discredit male profiteers throughout the literary scene. The usefulness of such an approach shall also be discussed, considering that the ideal relationship between a muse and an artist as one of inspiration and creation must not be destroyed.

The work is based on the idea of the common represented in the essays of post-Yugoslav women writers and authors, and reflected in the socially engaged transnationality, anationality, antimilitarism and feminism. The common, transnational viewpoint of essayists Dubravka Ugrešić, Rada Iveković, Jasmina Tešanović, Lepa Mlađenović and Alma Lazarevska is revealed in the observed and critiqued societal systems of nationalism, which are conditioned by patriarchal structures. In other words, the Yugoslav national armed conflicts were based on the war of the sexes, according to these authors. Their activist essays break down the cluster of stereotypes (Yugoimaginarium) that stems from a nationalised and militarised construction of sexes, as well as a primary patriarchal need for control, especially visible in the figure of the mother-nation and in the escalation of different forms of conflict-related violence against women. A special place in the anti-war women's essayist discourse belongs to those women authors who experienced war (directly), and are in a position that allows for the most precise reflection on the devastating effect of the war trauma but also of the narratives that led to threatened existence: tradition, history, and nationalism. Post-Yugoslav women essayists wrote from nearly identical activist vantage points of resistance, using an alternative discourse to build safe spaces of transnationality. Therefore, the corpus of post-Yugoslav anti-war women's essays became a centre of new discovery about our and other wars.

In this paper we deal with the issue of transnational literature using the case of the author of Bosnian origin Elvira Mujčić who, as a representative of the so-called second generation of immigrant writers in Italy, writes and publishes exclusively in Italian. The paper pays special attention to the issue of language in the construction of identity, which the author deals with in one of her most important novels, La lingua di Ana. Chi sei quando perdi radici e parole. If we accept in theoretical terms one of the basic principles of transnational locational feminism (for which Susan Stanford Friedman, literary critic and author of the influential study Mappings, is credited) stating that a literary text creates theory, the novel Ana's Language can be considered a programmatic work that explores the question of language and its connection with identity, but also with the Other. The dominant idea in the novel is the coexistence of two languages as a possibility for creating a relationship with the Other, one that is different from us, which enables the fluidity of the heroine's identity, but also her rejection of binary categories of existence, which is in line with the basic settings of locational feminism. As we will try to show in the paper, the host’s language has the additional function of rebirth after her traumatic exile from the language of her origin. As Elvira Mujčić is also actively involved in literary translation, we will consider her essay with the symbolic title “L’Altra”, in which she explains her own understanding of the coexistence of two languages, and the meaning and function of translation. Also, this paper tries to point out the need for a further mapping of diasporic literary voices, as well as the need for considering the status and recognition of female and male writers in the host country.

In this paper I analyse Memoirs, written by a Polish woman, Teodora (née Kosmowska) Krajewska (1854–1935), in the context of emancipatory discourse. The aim is to point out the strategies of Krajewska’s actions towards the cultural and physical emancipation of Bosnian women in the aforementioned context, what obstacles she had to overcome in this process and why her Memoirs are important in the cultural memory of women’s history. Krajewska worked as a doctor and teacher in Bosnia and Herzegovina for 34 years and made a strong impression there. Memoirs, as a bearer of memory, are important from the perspective of the history of women, herstory, especially the history of BiH Muslim women, who had no voice until then. They are also important as an exceptional element in the creation of a transnational network of female authorship narratives in general. One of the research perspectives in the context of winning a place for herstory in cultural memory is the experience of the female body. In this context, I give consideration to how understanding femininity through the prism of the body and its biological nature influences the process of forgetting/remembering and thus the absence/presence of narratives by women and about women in cultural memory. I refer, therefore, to the notion of gender in Maria Solarska’s interpretation in Encyclopedia gender: płeć w kulturze (Encyclopaedia of Gender: Sex in Culture) and the description of the relationship between femininity and power by Agnieszka Zembrzuska in Problem ślepoty rodzajowej u Michela Foucault (The Problem of Gender Blindness in Michel Foucault). I place the category of Alaida Assmann’s cultural memory, which she explains in the anthology Między historią a pamięcią (Between History and Memory), within this theoretical and methodological framework and I use it in correlation with the notion of corporeality as defined by Ewa Hyży in Kobieta. Ciało. Tożsamość. Teorie podmiotu w filozofii feministycznej końca XX wieku (Woman. Body. Identity. Theories of the Subject in Feminist Philosophy at the End of the 20^th Century). In the paper, I follow the emancipatory steps of Krajewska, who educated and treated Bosnian women, sharply criticising them, but also offering her full understanding, empathy and affection. In a detailed and quite special way, Krajewska’s autobiographical records show how a Polish physician influenced the process of the emancipation of Bosnian women.

The paper is a product of the genealogical, bibliographic and literary historical research on the private life and literary texts of Lela Davičo, with the goal of drawing attention to her work and examine the literary and historical context in which it was produced. Lela Davičo wrote essays, dramas, prose poems, as well as literary sketches, and the themes of love and women’s position in society dominate her work. She was strongly influenced by emancipatory ideas at the turn of the 20^th century, so her oeuvre could be considered a contribution to feminist heritage. For a clearer overview, Lela Davičo’s entire body of work could be divided into three periods: the Pest period, the Belgrade period and the Munich period. The Belgrade period, which lasted between 1887 and 1903, when she wrote in the Serbian language, is particularly important for Serbian literature.

Тhis article analyzes the novel You Have to Smile by Luisa Valenzuela, in an attempt to show the birth of feminist ideas not only in the author's works but also in Argentinian literary works. Through the protagonist Clara, the novel critically thematizes the position of women and their search for identity. In this regard, the paper emphasizes the influence of society and the family in the formation of women's identity and position. It also analyzes how the author presents the body of the protagonist as a battleground of old and new ideologies in Argentina in the 1960s. The family and society will create a system within which a woman is subordinate to a man and his decisions. This results in the objectification and dehumanization of the protagonist, through whom Valenzuela represents a whole generation of submissive and silenced women.