engleski

The Many Afterlives of Marija Jurić Zagorka and the Becoming of Feminist Literary Criticism in Croatia

The canonization of “women’s literature” (understood here in broad terms, as literature written by women) in Croatian literary history got on its way only at the end of last century, namely in 1998, with the book suitably entitled “The Prettier Half of Literature” by Dunja Detoni-Dujmić. In her book female prose writings is divided into two dominant stylistic trends: the first one, from Illyrian movement till the First World War – the trend that meet interweaving of utopian feminism with lyrical, esoteric and expressionist prose writing. The second wave, so-called “feminist-reformist”, has been established around the First World War. Fin de siècle was largely marked by literary and political activity of Marija Jurić Zagorka (1873-1953), which, despite her public pursuits, remained largely unexplored in cultural studies and literary scholarship. Her works, based on repetitions, clichés, strict narrative functionalism and oppositions such as chaos-order and good-evil, have been widely criticized even in more contemporary approaches to literature by literary scholars who considered Zagorka’s works through the methodological lenses of strict criteria of “high literature”. In this sense, Croatian literary scholarship from 2010’s onward has truly reconnoitered Zagorka’s work: from a monosemantic writer she becomes an “unknown champion of women’s history in Croatia”, i.e. a fundamental figure around which complex issues of feminism and popular culture, women’s history, and feminism and anti-feminism are being explored in myriad ways. My presentation will present Zagorka life and work and situate her in the context of contemporary Croatian cultural studies and literary scholarship. Furthermore, I will offer possible explanations of why Zagorka operates in such powerful ways in contemporary literary scholarship? Who writes about her, how, and who is the addressee of literary scholarship about Zagorka? What does it mean to write about female authorship and how does women’s history come into being?

Marija Jurić Zagorka, feminist literary criticism

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