The fifth issue of Knjiženstvo, Journal for Studies in Literature, Gender and Culture which has been initiated within the research project Knjiženstvo – Theory and History of Women's Writing in Serbian until 1915 and financed by The Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia is marked by the conference What is Knjiženstvo?, held at the Faculty of Philology on 16-17 October 2015. Most of the papers published in this issue were presented at this academic convention, and here you have the edition which should transfer the atmosphere and the themes dealt with at the conference organized to celebrate the project’s fifth year: digital humanities, women and war, women in public discourse, poetry, prose and women’s periodicals.

The central section, “Women’s Literature and Culture”, consists of 24 papers and it begins with a text on digital humanities and cyber feminism, which opened the conference. It is followed by a segment about women and war – nurses, women partisans and, further on, about women’s war narratives, written by Draga Jovanović, Virginia Woolf, Vera Obrenović Delibašić and Jasmina Musabegović. An article on socialist prison forced-labor prose of Milka Žicina follows the war narratives segment. The subsequent part encompasses four papers on poetry, from the Serbian lyric folk poetry interpreted in light of women’s writing (écriture féminine) to the contemporary poetry of Marija Knežević, Radmila Lazić, Bisera Alikadić and Ferida Duraković. The third segment of this section considers narrative discourse dominated by the reminiscences of one’s own childhood or the fates of others, as in the case of the recent books of Ljubica Mrkalj, Slavica Garonja and Tanja Stupar Trifunović, or the unfinished novel of Judita Šalgo. It also includes texts about the understanding of androgyny of Virginia Woolf, about Hélène Cixous’ novel and the reception of Madame de La Fayette’s famous novel. Then follow two papers which deal with women scientists and the memory of their work: the first one is about women physicists in Serbia during socialism and the post-socialist period, while the other represents a thoroughly documented story about personal and professional path of Julka Popović-Savić, a woman scientist and a doctor. The closing segment of the section “Women’s Literature and Culture” is made up of papers on public discourse. The first one deals with the magazine Jugoslavenska žena and its editor Zofka Kveder. The second paper focuses on public discourse in connection with reproductive politics in Spain and Serbia within the SFRY. The text on the analysis of the position of women within the daily press, which uses methods of corpus and computational linguistics, represents the closure of this segment and this section. It concludes the thematic sequence started with the text about digital humanities, but also opens a new perspective on the approach to public and literary discourse.

In this issue we conducted an interview with Henriette Partzsch, a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Glasgow and the Head of the project Travelling Texts, 1790-1914: The Transnational Reception of Women's Writing at the Fringes of Europe (Finland, The Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain). Among other topics, we discussed women’s periodicals and European projects.

Seven new publications are presented in the section “Reviews”. The first one is about the critical edition of the work of Anica Savić Rebac, and the following one about the selected stories of Milka Žicina. The new book of Renata Jambrešić-Kirin also comes into focus. Two books reviewed in this section deal with drama – Ibsen and his influence on Chinese modernism, and women’s dramatic work within the former Yugoslavia. A review of a collection of papers on women and the concept of nation from the European project COST IS0901, and another one of a study on ethics and vulnerability of the woman philosopher Erinn Gilson, conclude this section.

In accordance with this issue as a whole, the section “Events” portrays the conference What is Knjiženstvo? and its accompanying events, both in word and in picture.

Editorial board of the Knjiženstvo journal

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