For this diploma thesis, titled “The Female Voice in Macedonian Poetry”, I undertook a study of contemporary Macedonian women’s poetry based on “Ova e moeto posledno molčenje – panorama na aktuelni sovremeni makedonski poetesi” (2016). In the first chapter, I briefly outlined the beginnings of Macedonian poetry in general and went on to describe the first milestones in contemporary Macedonian Women poetry, which extend from the Middle Ages to folk singing and continue through to first Macedonian Women's poetry collection “Grešnica” (1960) by Evgenija Šuplinova and to the OEMPM anthology. In the middle part of my thesis, in order to analyse the OEMPM anthology, I firstly presented a general outline of it and then I focused mainly on a motif-thematic analysis of the poems collected in the anthology in question. I briefly touched on the linguistic and stylistic characteristics of the poems while emphasising the frequent presence of dialogue and intertextuality as specific features of the poetry under consideration. In the chapter on motif-thematic analysis, I highlighted a set of 12 motifs that are the most common in the discussed poems: love, the position of women in society, confessional motifs, motifs of transience and memories, motifs of sleep and dreams, silence, self poetry, nature, city, motifs of folk tradition, historical (ancient) motifs and biblical motifs. I explained the existence of each motif with the most illustrative examples of verses from the OEMPM anthology. In the last chapter of this diploma thesis, I presented the results found in the OEMPM anthology, which despite its revolutionary nature and great importance for contemporary Macedonian women’s poetry, were rather modest and unremarkable. However, based on the entire analysis, I have come to the conclusion that the publication of the OEMPM anthology is a huge step towards placing Macedonian poetesses alongside Macedonian poets, and thus is crucial for the development of women’s poetry in Macedonia.
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