engleski

Herstory of a (Foreign) Country: Imaginary Worlds of Ivana Brlić Mažuranić

This paper highlights the imagery of Ivana Brlić Mažuranić's historical novel Jaša Dalmatin viceroy of Gujarat (1937). This is the novel of the character in which the young protagonist Jaša from Dubrovnik, Slavic slave in Constantinople, becomes the viceroy of the Indian province of Gujarat. The story takes place first in Constantinople and then in Gujarat, at the end of 15th century, in the period which is marked by the Ottoman expansion and of Portuguese conquest of West India. Instead of evoking exoticist images, space and time of the radical Otherness for the most part become a scenery of (re)creating slavenophilic ideologemes, which have traditionally been a vital part of Croatian political discourse dominated by the learned male elite. Hence, these ideologemes and imagemes have been mediated into Ivana's novel mostly through literary, historical and political authority of her male ancestors: father Vladimir, who was historian and grandfather Ivan, Croatian governor and author of the The Death of Smail-aga Čengić. Self identification of Ivana Brlić Mažuranić as a writer grows out of sofisticated interaction of heteroimages and autoimages which have been made by writers and historians of her family, thus reflecting contradictions and ambivalence of her personal, gender and literary imagery.

Jaša Dalmatin; viceroy of Gujarat; imagery; slavophilic ideologemes; interaction of heteroimages and autoimages

nije evidentirano