Rad na kanonizaciji ženskog autorstva u međuratnoj Jugoslaviji
Canonisation of Women’s Authorship in Interwar Yugoslavia

Author(s): Jelena Petrović
Subject(s): History, Gender Studies, Sociology, Gender history
Published by: Етнографски институт САНУ
Keywords: women’s authorship; literary canon; feminism; emancipatory politics of knowledge production; interwar Yugoslavia
Summary/Abstract: This contribution to the collection on the heritage and importance of women in academia indicates extensive, systematic, and engaged individual and collective, critical, and theoretical work in the field of the organization, affirmation, and promotion of women’s literary creations and the determination of its foundational starting points and concepts based on selected examples of the canonisation of women’s authorship in interwar Yugoslavia. On the one hand, it starts from the ideological and programmatic absence of women in the so-called universal literary canon, the marginal positioning of women’s authorship, and the evaluation / labelling of women’s literary production, and in this regard, the special emphasis on the prefix feminine by the authoritative representatives and creators of the official literary canon (who first introduced and defined the term female literature as incomplete and less valuable, and then, paradoxically, in the universal understanding of literature, as impossible). On the other hand, the analysis of interdisciplinary research and academic texts that bear witness to that time rediscovers the scope and significance of women’s creativity, as well as selected feminist texts that determined the importance of women’s authorship and the necessity of its presence in literary studies. Selected examples in this paper indicate, above all, the presence of women’s authorship in public discourses, attempts of literary-historical canonisation, and feminist interpretations and literary criticism of female literature during this period of time. Thanks to numerous women’s magazines and organised events, newly established women’s publishing houses, independent publications and the emancipation of a small number of literature lovers who opened the public literary space for the second sex, women’s literary creations has flourished through the persistent feminist struggle both for literary and for any other equality.

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