Engaged Women’s Prose Writing

Abstract

On the basis of the notional, thematic, artistic and stylistic similarities observed in the literary works of several Belgrade authors (Mitra Mitrović, Milka Žicina, Nadežda Ilić Tutunović, Frida Filipović), in this paper their literary corpus is designated with the terminological phrase engaged women’s prose writing and viewed as a separate and integral phenomenon. The aim of the paper has been to abstract the basic characteristics of this literary-historical occurrence, which had an uninterrupted continuity from the 1930s till the 1950s, and to set a possible notional-theoretical framework for further readings, interpretations, and comparative research of the given and similar literary corpora. The methodological frame for describing the engaged women’s prose writing has been formed by combining three methodological disciplinary directions: a) Sartre’s definition of engaged literature, b) earlier literary-historiographic and theoretical examination of the Yugoslav social literature movement, and c) the feminist research of the history of women, feminist movements, and women’s literature. Sartre’s concept of engaged literature articulated after World War Two is set as the connective thread of argumentation: it is applied to the given women’s prose writing and vice versa, the interpretations of this prose enrich the given concept, adding to it a diachronically deeper and potentially feminist aspect. Finally, the results of the research are related to the activist studies, which in our context in the past few years gain the shape of a socio-humanistic subfield. A concise conclusion from the research thus organized is the following: viewed as a distinct occurrence, to an extent, the given prose corpus is most simply described with the proposed terminological phrase engaged literary prose; as part or companion of the social literature movement, this prose expands and enriches the notion itself; as an occurrence that must be considered in terms of Sartre’s ideas, it offers a supplement and expansion of the notion of engaged literature, extending its use and giving it new topicality; as a historical phenomenon, this prose is part of the process of global and “local” Yugoslav emancipation and has a place in the revolutionary transformation of the Yugoslav society; as a literary-historical phenomenon, engaged women’s prose writing reveals both the strengthening of female authorship and the rise of the new layers of (female) reading audience.