In this paper I broach the subject of the status of Slovene female poets in literary history and ask about the interests that lie behind the creation, explanation and transmission of the literary canon. In this regard, the Slovene literary system shows itself to be traditionally limited, as it retains patriarchal patterns of evaluating and comprehending sexual identities, pushing female poets into permanent
marginality, shown by their absence from anthologies, literary histories, selected works and readers. Thus it was only recently that there appeared an extensive contemporary anthology of Slovene female poets, which in addition to all the other issues of separate or parallel development, raises the question as to how the image of the other and the different is constructed by the female poets themselves, or what they talk about and what they remain silent on. University study represents an opportunity to redirect attention into this unresearched landscape of Slovene poetry, while feminist literary studies offers a range of theoretical tools with which to break through the monologue of a single, universal gender.
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