From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature (Lettre)

This study of contemporary literature from the former Yugoslavia (Post-Yugoslavia) follows the ways in which the feminist writing of gender, body, sexuality, and social and cultural hierarchies brings to light the past of socialist Yugoslavia, its cultural and literary itineraries and its dissolution in the Yugoslav wars. The analysis also focuses on the particularities of different feminist writings, together with their picturing of possible futures. The title of the book suggests an attempt to interpret post-Yugoslav literature as feminist writing, but also a process of conceptualizing a post-Yugoslav literary field, in this study represented by contemporary fiction from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. Women's writing from the former/post-Yugoslavia recollects but also produces the links among the post-Yugoslav present and the Yugoslav past - as either those bygone Yugoslav days or the recent war history. Along with a gynocritical intervention that draws attention to an uninterrupted marginalization of women authors, but also structurally confined female narrators and protagonists, Tijana Matijevic conceptualizes the post-Yugoslav literary field, i.e. the contemporary literary production from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. Along this quest to find the Female Continent, post-Yugoslavia has been demarcated and liberated by feminist writing as collective space - building . Contents I Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent II Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction III Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine IV The Other Writing: Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction V What to Do With the Past? Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju VI What to Do With the Past? Feminist Literary Historiographies II: Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba VII Conclusions. Inherited Possibility, Or: Choosing The Optimal Variant Bibliography