Title of the lecture: Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić in her time era
Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić with her literary work, but also with her life course and destiny, largely represents the social, historical, political, cultural and literary context of the period in which she lived. The artistic strength and persuasiveness of her literary work, together with her social status and achievements, make her one of the most interesting characters in Croatian literature, culture and society as a whole. Born in the politically and socially influential and respected Mažuranić family, brought up according to the relatively rigid guidelines of the so-called old canon, educated in a family environment focused on the tradition and strongly determined by the Christian ideology, Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, through her life and work, symbolically reflects the transition from the long 19th century and its rigid regulation of woman’s existence on a personal and social level towards the new century in which femininity is gradually being redefined and transformed, which is strongly symbolically evidenced by some of the turning points in her life, such as, for example, the fact that at the end of the 19th century (1892) her parents arranged her marriage, while forty years later she was elected to JAZU as the first female member (1937), and during the 1930s she was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
This lecture will focus on the key events in the life of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić in the social and historical-political context, as well as in the context of the history of everyday life, whereby the author’s personal figure is seen as a representative figure of the female history of the newly emerging Croatian middle class at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.