Делија девојка у српској усменој епици
A Woman as Warrior in a Serbian Oral Epic

Summary/Abstract: The subject of this paper is the motif of a woman warrior in a Serbian oral epic. Our corpus is formed from collections by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, as well as from other older collections. Here are examined poems where a woman by disguise transforms herself into a man, in order to take over social roles that are only reserved for the malegender and gain a different source of power temporarily changing her gender. This motif is analysed regarding The Rites of Passage by Arnold van Gennep, marking a preliminary, liminaire and postliminaire phase in the initiation of the heroines. Our goal is to place poems into groups considering the cause of remodeling their body, in order to demonstrate their mutual morphology.

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