Foreign literary influences, German and Western European in particular, played a pivotal role in the 19th-century Slovenian literary field. During this time, the first female Slovenian authors emerged. Among them was Pavlina Pajk (1854–1901) who continued the tradition of the sentimental novel. Her texts incorporate several topics and motifs associated with the novels of other Western female authors, in particular those of George Sand. Moreover, Pajk was the first Slovenian woman writer who, presumably influenced by Western ideas, started writing about “the woman question”. This article thus presents Pajk’s ideas concerning “the woman question” in her writings.
The present study deals with Růžena Svobodová’s prose work from the turn of the century. It views the novels Zamotaná vlákna (Tangled Threads, 1899), Milenky (Mistresses, 1902) and the collection of short stories Pěšinkami srdce (The Paths of the Heart, 1902) as aesthetic phenomena, through which it is to some extent possible to (re-)construct the literary debate going on at that time, its trends and its transformations. By interpreting these novels and short stories against the backdrop of our knowledge of the author’s early works, as well as by comparing their journal and book versions, we aim to identify new elements in their content and form, which are essentially a manifestation of movements in the literary field.
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