At the end of the 19^th century in Croatia, an increasing number of women entered the public sphere as artists and cultural workers. One such educated professional was Jagoda Truhelka (1864–1957), who worked as a teacher and predominantly wrote children’s and young adult literature as well as pedagogical essays. Truhelka’s main contribution to Croatian literary fiction is Plein air (1897), a novel featuring modernist narrative tendencies and a politically outspoken female protagonist, Zdenka Podravac (Nemec, Detoni Dujmić). Plein air is narrated from the point of view of Vlatko, a young man infatuated with Zdenka, a strong-willed and independent artist who supports herself and her elderly father by painting. As a woman artist, Zdenka experiences “anxiety of authorship” (Gilbert and Gubar) because of her social and economic position. She must also come to terms with masculine myths of femininity, learning to define herself beyond the stereotypical figures of “angel” and “monster”. In this way, her story is strikingly similar to that of Helen Graham, the heroine of Anne Brontë’s 1848 novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

The novel’s central tension between Zdenka’s recognition of women’s duties and her desire for freedom is not only crucial for her characterization but also for the construction of the plot, which resolves conventionally with Zdenka and Vlatko happily married. While Truhelka’s choice of ending might appear forced, this specific combination of early modernist narration and popular romantic fiction nevertheless results in exposing the cracks in patriarchal ideology. The sacrifice necessary for the novel’s happy ending reveals the limits of the romance plot because it demonstrates that the equality of independent heroines with men is still impossible, even unintelligible, in a society that may acknowledge their intelligence, strength, and other “masculine” qualities, but will regard them as “unfeminine” in a woman and an obstacle in attaining the ultimate feminine goal – marriage.

The essay explores the possibilities of a decolonial feminist reading of two collections of short stories by Asja Bakić, titled Mars and Sladostrašće (Lust), with reference to the critical thought developed by Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones. The analysis of the positionality of the narrator and the main motifs reveals facets of the features of ‘border thinking’, situated in the specific experiences of marginality and the workings of the hegemonic structures. Decolonial feminism is identified as a suitable analytical framework to engage the contexts of multiple exposures to violent ideologies and patriarchal order. Elements of the rhetoric of modernity, such as development, progress, anthropocentric and technological thinking as presented in the writing of Asja Bakić, are utilized to create the scenery for the violence that is instrumental for the preservation of existing hierarchies. Simultaneously, Bakić also succeeds in avoiding the trap of the essentialized gender representation. Furthermore, frequent references to European literary heritage used by the author are not attempts at cultural appropriation or an expression of an aspiration towards ‘Europeanness’ but offer a means to express or reaffirm literary forms of resistance to the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality and its inherent dehumanization of the ‘other’. Asja Bakić’s stories resist genre classification. This appears to be a deliberate subversion, rather than an incidental outcome of imaginative storytelling by the author. This move is made as an articulation of the Self enmeshed with a reflection of particular social and historical circumstances. Elements of fantasy and mythology are entangled with the memories of socialism and sexual imagery with pornographic hints. The underlying themes of these stories involve power and resistance to power, agency, seizing control, seeking out freedom and taking liberties. Asja Bakić creates literary worlds that – through destabilization, displacement and humor – challenge the imposed ‘universality’ of the male gaze, while at the same time refusing to participate in the fragmentation and dehumanization of her own readership.

This paper examines the relation between female characters and cars in three F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels:The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night and The Beautiful and Damned. The introduction offers a brief explanation of the role of stereotyping and generalisation, while the analytical part of the paper examines a concrete stereotype that depicts women as bad drivers, and it also draws a parallel between driving a car and handling power and authority. The main part of the paper focuses on illuminating the characterisation of women through the lens of correlation between their driving skills and gender. Female characters at the steering wheel are portrayed as a danger to themselves and everyone else on the road. Their feminine qualities hinder their driving abilities, thus making them incapable of controlling the power the car gives them and, by extension, any type of power.

George Eliot was often a target of feminist criticism due to her conventional representation of female characters. The aim of this article is to pоint to the fact that, аlthough grounded in conservative ideology, her attitudes toward the “Woman Question” and marriage were original and unconventional. Although George Eliot’s views were ahead of her time, she did not take part in the ongoing struggle of the Suffragettes. Still, the implication of Middlemarch is that women were limited by their gender during the Victorian era. To be a woman and to want to achieve something grand and important is nothing but easy in the fictional world of Dorothea Brooke. The novel implies that opportunities for women were limited, but that women still could realize their aspirations through moral influence. Ideally, female characters in Eliot’s fiction function as moral guides exerting influence on men. Moreover, influence is the means for achieving their own goals. Although Dorothea Brooke achieves some kind of an agreement with society, she does so under her own terms, and the epilogue of the novel suggests that, although unknown, a lot of women in a similar manner positively influence the progress of society – by means of indirect influence in a narrow circle of friends and acquaintances. In this respect, the destiny of Dorothea Brooke is representative and it glorifies the modest contributions of ordinary people. When it comes to the concept of marriage, the implication of the novel is that the institution of marriage undergoes a crisis because it is founded on wrong values. Marriage should not be reduced to a social contract and it should not be rushed into, but it should rather be seen as an opportunity to create a meaningful and open relationship through closer insight into yourself and your partner. In Eliot’s opinion, a crucial requirement for a successful marriage is openness and maturity of thoughts and feelings. Contrary to how marriage is presented in a typical Victorian novel, in Middlemarch it is presented not as the final goal but as the beginning of a communion which brings many challenges and problems, which might be overcome only bymutual goodwill and effort. Her first marriage is unfruitful because there is no understanding between her and Mr. Casaubon. However, Dorothea’s second marriage is characterized by openness and her second husband, Will Ladislaw, is a man eager to be guided and helped. Their mutual openness and effort lead to mutual understanding and to the development of a relationship all couples should aspire to.

This paper discusses the influence of the Soviet government on creating the “new Soviet woman,” who is meant to respond to the ideological needs of the new social arrangement, and the government’s subsequent attitude towards her, on the example of Andrei Platonov’s play Fools on the Periphery. The emancipation of women, their inclusion in all spheres of life, as well as their right to abortion are, as it turns out, only the government’s mechanisms, created to establish an absolutist regime and have no contact with the aspiration of socialism to improve the lives of women both in the province and in the capital. The new emancipated Soviet woman in the 1920s and 1930s gained fictitious rights that led to social catastrophe. Looking for their place in socialism, women were torn between hard work and domestic responsibilities, which further threatened their former position. By all accounts, socialist women are equal to men in terms of the right to work, while in other spheres, they are further humiliated (maternity, salary, type of work place etc.). All described phenomena can be noticed on the example of Platonov’s drama, in the character of the former housewife Marya Basmakova, who loses her own identity in the process of the so-called Soviet emancipation. Even though Marya Basmakova herself is not aware of her rights and ways of enforcing them, it becomes obvious to her that all the new changes do not represent a path to women’s liberation, but lead to complete control over women’s bodies, pregnancy and abortion. The death of her child symbolises the collapse of a false project of women’s emancipation in which her character represents the dead foundation on which the image of a progressive Soviet government was built.

Anđa Petrović (1889–1914) was the daughter of Mita Petrović and the sister of Nadežda and Rastko Petrović, as well as violinist and painter Ljubica Luković and poets Draga Petrović and Milica Mišković. Anđa Petrović is remembered for her famous correspondence with Leo Tolstoy on the topic of the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this correspondence, Anđa revealed herself as a great patriot who believed that freedom could be won only through war and with the aid of great and powerful allies, such as Russia. For this reason, she also took upon herself the role of a diplomat, not allowing Tolstoy’s pacifism and idealism to turn her into a resigned person. Although the Russian writer turned a deaf ear to her pleadings for spreading awareness of the injustices inflicted upon the Serbian people, she did, undeniably, leave an impression on him in the sense that it was because of her that he wrote a treatise on the Serbian question. She left behind one published and several unpublished manuscripts, which are the topic of this paper. Her works are essayistic, historiographic, and literary in character. The essential topic they deal with is that of women in Serbian history, hence patriotism and feminism may be viewed as the main traits of her works. From familial and love affairs in the family of Prince Miloš Obrenović, with a focus on the relationship between Princess Ljubica and the Prince’s mistresses Petrija and Jelenka, to public speeches and essays on literature and women’s emancipation, and the story of her own nostalgia for her native region, Anđa’s opus, albeit partially preserved and incomplete, is essentially integral in terms of both theme and style. When it comes to the works that have not been preserved, it is possible to learn about them from the few available newspaper texts dedicated to this author. The goal of this paper is to analyze her literary oeuvre and to conduct research into the intertextuality that can be found in it. Owing to her lecture notes from her comparative literature lessons, it is possible to reconstruct the influences on her body of work. She paid special attention to the analysis of Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra, so it is possible to find a link with this play in Anđa’s portrayal of Princess Ljubica’s character.

Katarina Popović Midžina's Great Serbian Cookbook, with its six editions from 1876 to World War II, is an indispensable source of information when it comes to the alimentation habits of the urban population in the second half of the 19^th and the early 20 ^th century. This cookbook, however, does not describe Serbian traditional cuisine, but presents to the Serbian audience a selection of dishes from developed European cuisines, primarily the Viennese cuisine. In this light, this cookbook presents an effort to name and describe in the Serbian language foods and dishes that until then were not part of the Serbian food tradition, and therefore were not named. Although often cited according to different editions, this work has not been the subject of detailed analysis. In particular, there are serious differences between the third and fourth edition, mainly due to the efforts of Mileva Simić, whose authorial role has remained completely hidden. In order to examine her role in the reshaping of the Great Serbian Cookbook, a digital corpus consisting of the text of the third edition, which contains the unchanged second edition, and the fourth edition was compiled. This corpus illustrates the language of Midžina (second edition), anonymous users of the book (appendix to the third edition) and Mileva Simić (fourth edition). Starting from the results of processing the corpus, the effort of both authors to develop the necessary terminological apparatus in the Serbian language for describing culinary procedures and products is recognized, which is reflected in “artificial expressions”, as Midžina calls them. These terms (for foods or dishes) are Serbian coined expressions for foreign, primarily German, culinary terms. As the corpus shows, the terms coined in this way did not always have a clear meaning and a precise relationship to the foreign equivalent, and they were not in accordance with the already accepted loanwords, as evidenced, above all, by the corpus of literary works from the same era. Starting from Midžina's idea, Mileva Simić adapted the text of the recipes to the tastes of the users at her time, omitting unusual ingredients. Also, terminologically, she separated numerous culinary concepts that Midžina did not discern. The paper shows the evolution of the texts of these cookbooks and analyses examples that show their differences in the authors’ naming of ingredients and dishes, as well as the relationship to later accepted terminological solutions, primarily in the cookbook by Spasenija Marković, known as Pata’s Cookbook.

This paper is about the attitude of Jelena J. Dimitrijević (1862–1945), a Serbian woman writer, feminist and world traveler, to the India of Gandhi and Tagore’s time. Jelena J. Dimitrijević is deeply aware of Gandhi’s ideas and also of the reformist ideas of the poet Tagore, which both influence her view of India in 1927. The author’s stance against colonialism and her perspective of a world traveler from Serbia are important aspects of her understanding of this country. Тhe paper is based on both books of her travelogue Seven Seas and Three Oceans from her journey around the world – namely, Book One, which was published in 1940 and republished in 2016, and Book Two, which was completely transcribed from a manuscript held at the National Library of Serbia and published for the first time in 2020. Also used are certain poems of Dimitrijević’s that are still in a manuscript at the National Library. The paper reveals Dimitrijević’s anti-colonial attitude, similarities with Gandhi’s pacifism and his actions, and her understanding of Tagore’s engagement in reforms. Comparisons between the struggles for liberation in Serbia and India and the effects of colonialism in Egypt and India are also presented. Jelena J. Dimitrijević had always had a special interest in women’s social position, and her views on the status of women in India were similar to both Gandhi’s and Tagore’s – that is, that the time for a radical change had come. The text presents her thoughts on early marriage and the lives of widows. In both her travelogue and her poem, she pointed to those who were responsible for the ill fate of women and demanded the change of laws in order to make women’s lives bearable.

Interview with Katja Mihurko Poniž, conducted by Biljana Dojčinović

Ashapurna Devi and Feminist Consciousness in Bengal: A Bio-Critical Reading / Dipannita Datta. – Edition 1. Includes annexures and index, illustrated (photographs courtesy by Nupur Gupta). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015, 335 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0-19-809999-4, ISBN-10: 0-19-909999-1.

From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature / Tijana Matijević. – Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2020 – 274 pp. – ISBN Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5209-3, PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5209-7.

Regaining the Past. Yugoslav Legacy in the Period of Transition: The Case of Formal and Alternative Institutions of Art and Culture in Serbia at the End of the 20th and the Beginning of the 21st Century / Tijana Vuković. – Warsaw–Bellerive-sur-Allier: Faculty of „Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw Wydawnictwo DiG, 2022. – 343 str. – ISBN DIG: 978-83-286-0204-5 & ISBN La Rama: 979-10-95627-88-3

Eurofringes. Translating Texts, Translating Cultures / edited by Carmen Duţu. – Bucureşti: Pro Universitaria, 2021, 170 pages, ISBN 978-606-26-1414-0.