Reimagining the Female Continent in Contemporary Serbian Literature

The article focuses on the quest of the female continent, the founding of female Utopia and the recurring figure of female Christ (or Messiana) in the Serbian women’s writing of the nineties. Judita Šalgo and Mirjana Novaković construct their respective plots and characters so as to present a possible Herland – Utopia founded by women - once designed in the writing of Charlotte Perkins Gillman. The motif of the territory which offers protection to women from hostility of all kinds springs from the wish to escape postcommunist contrarieties by establishing a mythical hiding place which offers oblivion rather than revolution. The paper starts with an introduction into contemporary Serbian fiction, which outlines three narrative strategies: postmodern textual play, rewriting history, and obsessive confession. The common interest of all the writers, however, lies in the reinvention of reality: Radoslav Petković, Dragan Velikić, Mileta Prodanović, Sreten Ugričić and David Albahari manipulate facts and fiction in different ways, exploring the blurry border between the two, and the result of this playful trespassing is metafiction packed with actual events from either recent or remote history, that offers a plausible redefinition of a world confused with rejecting the totalitarian past and embracing a promised future of capitalist consumerism. Unlike their male counterparts, Serbian women writers explore the pursuit of happiness as a way to define priorities of a marginalized Other. Mirjana Novaković and Judita Šalgo either twist master narratives or reinvent intimate stories in order to escape preestablished designs imposed by the male-oriented literary canon which advocates the superiority of men by relegating women's stories and histories to dark and hidden places.