Ivana Dizdar delivered a presentation entitled Local Voices, Global Insights: Women’s Narratives of Imotski Authors at the conference Literary Representations of Co-Existence, held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Split on 3 September 2026. The presentation forms part of a broader research topic concerning (marginalized) writers from the Imotski region, which Dizdar is pursuing as part of her postdoctoral research. The project explores the relationship between oral and written literature, the protagonists’ attachment to their homeland, and how critics and readers engage with forgotten texts and narratives as part of intangible cultural heritage. Accordingly, the presentation emphasized literary representations of the coexistence between humans and supernatural beings, as well as between literary characters and nature, in selected prose and poetry written by several non-canonical female authors from the Imotski region. The analyzed corpus includes both folk and authored literature, with a strong influence of oral tradition (Anka Petričević, Ruža Marasova, Dragica Zeljko Selak, Maja Delić Peršen, Mara Ožić Bebek, etc.). As part of the project, relevant literature establishing its methodological and theoretical foundations has also been collected. The presentation offered an initial application of selected concepts from feminist ecocriticism, humanistic geography, and cultural studies, three approaches that will also guide the research in the next phase of the project.
