Culture, Gender and Genre as Limits and Motives in the Interpretation of the Bosniak Ballad Hasanaginica

Abstract

The first part of the article discusses the cultural limits and motives in the interpretive approaches of Hasanaginica’s ballad, with a focus on its key verse “But his wife could not, because of modesty”. There are actualized the most prominent views on the nature of the main character’s shame, which, in the structure of the ballad, is functioning as the essential motivation of all subsequent events and the driving principle comparable to the tragic guilt in the tragedy. The authors then question the possibilities and achievements of reception theory, feminist, gender and social-cultural readings of the ballad, to point out at the end, genre presuppositions as an unavoidable fact in understanding its extreme semantic complexity.