Changing Pieces

In recent years, popular culture has witnessed the proliferation of violent female characters, while female criminality has also received increasing attention from many critics and academics. These women remain a fascination for both mainstream culture and researchers as their acts go against cultural conceptions and are even viewed as antithetical to femininity. And while the increasing presence of female violence in media and popular culture may be symptomatic of present-day society’s concerns about gender behavior, the portrayal of violent women still seems to be following genre conventions and familiar stereotypes that inevitably frame, and thus normalize, their acts within boundaries of traditional discourses on femininity. In that regard, Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-Feminist Era presents itself as a particularly timely book that investigates the representation of women who kill in a so-called postfeminist context recognized principally by a...

The aim of the article is to analyze the connection between non-places (as defined by Marc Augé) and unhomeliness (as understood by Homi Bhabha) in Cacophonie by Ken Bugul. The Senegalese writer has been best-known for her depiction of a postcolonial subject, torn between the Western and the African world. However, her last novel thus far, which concentrates on the trajectory of a Senegalese protagonist living in Benin, sheds new light on the notion of migrant identity. The heroine, Sali, does not belong anywhere. Just like most previous Bugulian protagonists, she is always in transit: her identity is one of an uprooted, fragmented subject. By examining the protagonist’s behavior in a public, archetypal non-place (an airport, a plane), as well in a private place (her house), the study strives to show Sali’s perpetual state of unhomeliness.Keywords: unhomeliness, non-place, postcolonial subject, Ken BugulThe postcolonial subject’s experience of migration and homecoming constitutes one o...

Među fjordove i gejzire, vrletne stijene i zastrašujuće ponore, smještena je priča sestara blizanki, Halldore i Sigridur, i njihove obitelji. Priča počinje opisom pokopa Sigridur i tugom ispunjenih dana preživjele sestre. Valter Hugo Mae vrlo nam živo i slikovito pripovijeda o nestabilnoj majci, koja za smrt kćeri krivi drugu kćer te je konstantnim ranjavanjem namjerno kažnjava, nanoseći joj bol. To je i priča o odnosu oca i kćeri, koji dane provode čitajući poeziju te u njoj pronalaze sve važne odgovore, snagu i smisao života. Znakovit je to početak romana, kojim Halla opisuje trenutak sestrine smrti, ujedno označen i kao novi početak života. Nakon njezine smrti, preživjela blizanka suočava se s vlastitim unutarnjim borbama, kao i s okolinom i neprihvaćanjem obitelji. Loš odnos s majkom kompenzira nježnim trenucima s ocem, a kasnije i kroz ljubavni odnos s Einarom, prožetim dubokim osjećajima. Einar, osebujni samotnjak kojeg su se sestre kao djevojčice plašile, za sobom vuče tajnovitu...

The paper investigates the extent and peculiarities of censorship in two Croatian editions of Pippi Longstocking, a classic of Swedish and world children's literature. Comparing the original Swedish text, contained in three books: Pippi Langstrump (1945/1948), Pippi Langstrump gar ombord (1946/1969) and Pippi Langstrump and Söderhavet (1948/1969), with the first edition of the Croatian translation published in 1973 and its revised 1996 edition shows significant differences in the number, layout, and title of chapters, and establishes the diversity of taboo topics present in both omitted and retained chapters. The retained chapters, after joining the micro-strategies previously adapted to the collected data (according to Desmet, Davoodi), also reveal clear variability in the way of translating taboo topics, such as inappropriate behavior, life (mis)fortunes, violence, racial intolerance, and religion.Keywords: Swedish children’s literature, censorship, taboo topics, translation micro-st...

In Iza’s Ballad, Magda Szabó writes about the lives of two doctors who meet and fall in love at university. “Don’t get too involved with politics,” experienced Antal warns a seemingly ingénue Iza. To which she responds: “Politics will be my life as long as I live.” In this brief encounter, Szabó connects the predominant themes of her oeuvre: politics and life, or, to be more specific, Communism and the domestic. In its analysis of Iza’s Ballad (1963), Katalin Street (1969), and The Door (1987), this article illustrates how Szabó’s descriptions of the domestic convey the impact of Hungary’s troubled political history on the concept of the home/homeland. The article illustrates the ways in which Szabó contrasts the relatively comfortable years of Goulash Communism with the hardship endured during WWII, under Rákosi, and during the 1956 Revolution, to convey the lasting effects of the Soviet occupation on the notion of home. Keywords: Magda Szabó; Hungary; homeland; 1956 Revolution; Goula...

Australian literature, as one of the vital constituents of English-speaking literature, boasts a rich diversity of themes and style, as does the society and continent on which it is located. It is rooted in an ancient landscape, which carries some of the oldest cultural traditions, as well as a mixture of numerous cultural immigrants. Ever since Patrick White received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, the literary critical public has turned its attention to the South, toward a distant and mystical land where contemporary writers who play with the aesthetic principles of the Western Circle have begun to emerge and remain loyal to Australia, attempting to understand and, at the same time, defining Australian culture – or a variety of its cultures. Until recently, a small number of scholars from Serbia and the neighboring countries approached the study of Australian literature. Theoretical concern for the Australian literature never substantially advanced our understanding of this r...