Ruch „młodych kobiet”? Transnarodowy kobiecy modernizm w Europie Środkowej na przełomie XIX i XX wieku
“Young Women’s” Movement? Transnational Female Modernism in Central Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th century

Author(s): Lena Magnone
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Polish Literature, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Central Europe; Habsburg Monarchy; women’s writing; modernism; transnational movement; youth movement; “new woman”
Summary/Abstract: While the turn of the 19th and 20th century constituted throughout Central Europe a period of unprecedented participation of women in literary life, as well as the moment when – after rejecting the previous formula combining into one the categories of gender and nation – new themes and distinctive poetics appeared in the women’s writing, from the perspective of national literary histories the fin-de-siècle female authors have hardly ever mattered: despite the notable efforts of gender-oriented researchers in Poland, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Croatia or Slovenia, local modernisms have all a ‘masculine face’. In this article, I propose to remove women modernists from national contexts and to perceive their works as a separate historical and literary phenomenon, with its own chronology and dynamics. At stake of this transnational approach is to restore a regional web, an overlooked network within the territory of the Habsburg monarchy, that I am inclined to tentatively qualify as ‘female Central European modernism’.

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