ON FEMALE PERSONIFICATION IN BARAKOVIĆ’S POEM VILA SLOVINKA

Abstract

The intent of this paper is to examine the basic features that characterise the manners in which the personified female characters are formed in Baraković ‘s poem Vila Slovinka (1614). This primarily implies a leading and titular female character emerging from a long allegorical tradition of personifying abstract content in a feminine form which gains its canonical form in Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, Alain’s The Plaint of Nature or Dante’s canonical epic poem, all of them allegorical works which will establish the model of allegorical female personification which directs and guides the male protagonist along the path to cognition. Thus conceived analysis would be further developed in concordance with contemporary theoretical reflections on the gendered dimension of personification, particularly those bequeathed to us by one of the most significant contemporary theoreticians of personification, James T. Paxson’s (1998), by conceiving it as a figure characterised by radical suspension of all fixedly defined ontological categories.