Abstract
The monograph Slovene Women Writers at the Beginning of the 20th Century consists of eleven literary studies and an appendix containing biographies of the authors. This comparative research focuses on Slovene female authors at the beginning of Slovene modernism (the so-called “moderna” period). In
This monograph attempts to bring into focus forgotten female Slovene writers from this period, thus offering a critical view into the creations of Slovenian female authors of the “moderna” era (with reference to the broader fin-de-siècle period).
The literary-historical and literary-theoretical view of texts is complemented by other approaches, especially feminist literary studies and methods of contextualization. The interdisciplinary research extends to the field of cultural studies and history. Ego-documents (research of the correspondence and literary archives of the authors) provide a great help in the research of the context and also in the research of their literary work. The research reveals their creation in a broader context, since the literary texts of female authors cannot be researched outside of the cultural-historical context. As such, we are also interested in the reception of their works by their contemporaries, which, in the patriarchal environment of the day, was restrictive and unfair to their unique voices.
This monograph focuses on the work of four key Slovene female authors of the “moderna” period: female prose writer and feminist Zofka Kveder
(1878–1926) and the female poets Vida Jeraj (1875–1932), Ljudmila Poljanec
(1874–1948), and Lili Novy (1885–1958). For female authors of the era, it was very difficult to assert themselves in the patriarchal, narrow-minded, and conservative Slovene environment. The authors (with the exception of
L. Novy) came from the generation of Slovene women writers who started publishing and developed as writers in the literary circle around the newspaper
Slovenka (Slovene Woman, 1897–1902). The research also reveals an intercultural and multicultural view of their creation, since during the
Austro-Hungarian period, Slovene female authors were bilingual cultural nomads with multiple identities.