O nekakvim nedozrelim djevojkama i njihovim sudbinama: Pripovijedanje djevojaštva u romanu Alma Josipa Barkovića
On Some Immature Girls and their Destinies: Narrating Girlhood in Josip Barković’s Novel Alma

Summary/Abstract: By engaging the debates on feminist postclassical narratology and by approaching literary representations of girls as one of the sites of the production of girlhood, understoodas a category independent of concrete discursive articulations and not as a reflection ofa stable biological or social category, this paper focuses on the analysis of Josip Barković’s Alma and aims to contribute to discussions on the relationship between genderand narration. Specifically, it argues that gender must not be considered in isolationor, in other words, that ignoring the broader socio-cultural context while discussingnovels about Yugoslav girls would mean ignoring the significance of Yugoslav socialismand attributing a feminist impulse to Barković’s novel. A brief discussion of the theoretical and socio-cultural context allows for the analysis of Barković’s novel focused onthe narrative fashioning of girlhood and the figure of the girl in order to show that aconsideration of the context of the novel and its further existence in the cultural fieldprovides a twofold advantage. On the one hand, it broadens the understanding of theactual cultural representations of the figure of youth with their incredibly importantrole in the Yugoslav socialist society while taking into account the category of gender.On the other hand, it expands the understanding of the socio-cultural context in whichthat figure is produced.

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