The Goethe era of German literature was dominated by men. Women were discouraged from reading and scorned as writers; Schiller saw female writers as typical 'dilettantes'. But the attempt to exclude did not always succeed, and the growing literary market rewarded some women's determination. This study combines archival research, literary analysis, and statistical evidence to give a sociological-historical overview of the conditions of women's literary production. Highlighting many authors who have fallen into obscurity, this study tells the story of women who managed to write and publish at a time when their efforts were not welcomed. Although eighteenth-century gender ideology is an important pre-condition for women's literary production, it does not necessarily determine the praxis of their actual experiences, as this study makes clear. Using a range of examples from a variety of sources, the real story of women who read, wrote, and published in the shadow of Goethe emerges.
"Literature written by women in German during the period long known patriarchally as the Age of Goethe was largely lumped in with other unserious or artistically unworthy works under the category Trivialliteratur, literally 'trivial literature.' Using insights from Gender Studies yet acknowledging the need for a literary canon, Great Books by German Women offers a critical interpretation of six canon-worthy German novels written by women in the period, for which it coins the term 'Age of Emotion.' The novels are chosen because they depict women's ordinary yet interesting lives and, equally, because each displays formal strengths that yield prose particularly able to express emotion. The first, Sophie von La Roche's Die Geschichte des Frèauleins von Sternheim (The History of Lady von Sternheim), draws on the tradition of the epistolary novel while also finding new ways to depict empathetic emotions. The second, Friederike Unger's Julchen Grèunthal, brings to the Frauenroman or women's novel the use of irony to portray a heroine's emotions during her coming of age. The next novels add lyricism to their prose to capture sensual emotions: Sophie Mereau's Blèutenalter der Empfindung (The Blossoming of Feeling) imagines women's affinity for the philosophical sublime, while Caroline Wolzogen depicts female desire in her Agnes von Lilien. The fifth novel, Die Honigmonathe (The Honeymoon), by Karoline Fischer, explores the agony that extreme emotions cause--not only for women but also for men. The last novel, Caroline Pichler's Frauenwèurde (The Dignity of Women) expands the focus from a young heroine to multiple mature characters while maintaining the centrality of women's talents and emotions. Finally, this study accords honorable mention to some other women's novels before concluding that the influence of these six works was in no way trivial, either in portraying women's lives and emotions or in the history of German literature"--
In an attempt to better account for the impressive diversity of positions and relations that characterizes the eighteenth-century world, this collection proposes a new methodological frame, one that is less hierarchical in approach and more focused, instead, on the nature of these interactions, on their Addisonian “usefulness,” declared goals, and (un)intended results. By shifting focus from a cultural-historicist approach to sociability to the rhizomatic nature of eighteenth-century associations, this collection approaches them through new methodological lenses that include social network analysis, assemblage and graph theory, social media and digital humanities scholarship. Imagining the eighteenth-century world as a networked community rather than a competing one reflects a recent interest in novel forms of social interaction facilitated by new social media—from Internet forums to various types of social networking sites—and also signals the increasing involvement of academic communities in digital humanities projects that use new technologies to map out patterns of intellectual exchange. As such, the articles included in this collection demonstrate the benefits of applying interdisciplinary approaches to eighteenth-century sociability, and their role in shedding new light on the way public opinion was formed and ideas disseminated during pre-modern times. The issues addressed by our contributors are of paramount importance for understanding the eighteenth-century culture of sociability. They address, among other things, clubbing practices and social networking strategies (political, cultural, gender-based) in the eighteenth-century world, the role of clubs and other associations in “improving” knowledge and behaviors, conflicting views on publicity, literary and political alliances and their importance for an emerging celebrity culture, the role of cross-national networks in launching pan-European and transatlantic trends, Romantic modes of sociability, as well as the contribution of voluntary associations (clubs, literary salons, communities of readers, etc.) to the formation of the public sphere. This collection demonstrates how relevant social networking strategies were to the context of the eighteenth-century world, and how similar they are to the congeries of new practices shaping the digital public sphere of today.
This volume showcases the vibrant and diverse contributions made to philosophy by women in 18th-century Germany and explores their under-appreciated influence upon the course of modern philosophy. Thirteen women are profiled and their work on topics in logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, and moral and political philosophy is discussed.
Women Write Back explores the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women’s responses to texts written by well-known Enlightment figures. Hilger investigates the authorial strategies employed by Karoline von Günderrode, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Julie de Krüdener, and Helen Maria Williams, whose works engage Voltaire’s Mahomet, Johnson’s Rasselas, Goethe’s Werther, and Rousseau’s Julie. The analysis of these women’s texts sheds light on the literary culture of a period that deemed itself not only enlightened but also egalitarian.
German women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been the subject of feminist literary critical and historical studies for around thirty years. This volume, with contributions from an international group of scholars, takes stock of what feminist literary criticism has achieved in that time and reflects on future trends in the field. Offering both theoretical perspectives and individual case studies, the contributors grapple with the difficulties of appraising 'non-feminist' women writers and genres from a feminist perspective and present innovative approaches to research in early women's writing. This inclusive and cross- disciplinary collection of essays will enrich the study of German women's writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and contribute to contemporary debates in feminist literary criticism. Anna Richards is Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, University of London. Helen Fronius is College Lecturer in German at Keble College, University of Oxford.
Although more recent critics have discerned an empowered female subject in Novalis, this is the first balanced, book-length study of gender in Novalis in English. It concludes that Hardenberg's Romantic writing began to be successful in reinventing the "fiction" of female identity, and goes further to reveal his extensive interaction with women as intellectual equals."--BOOK JACKET.
This monograph spotlights women writers’ contributions to the philosophy of German Romanticism. Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Bettina Brentano von Arnim suggested a new vision for an emancipated community of women that develops through philosophical discourse of Progressive Universal Poetry. Their personal, fictionalized, and literary letters reinvent and retheorize the Romantic notions of sociability, symphilosophy, and sympoetry, as theorized by men, and retheorize the concepts of love. They provided a model for shaping intellectual and cultural life in the modern world while challenging rigid dichotomies of classs, gender, and ethnicity.
Germaine de Staël and German Women: Gender and Literary Authority (1800-1850) investigates Staël's significance as an icon of female artistic genius and political engagement for two generations of German women, including Caroline A. Fischer, Caroline Pichler, Johanna Schopenhauer, Bettina von Arnim, Ida Hahn-Hahn, and Luise Mühlbach. These authors drew a significant impetus from Staël's exemplary life and writings, especially her influential novels of political and artistic heroines, Delphine (1802) and Corinne, or Italy (1807), referring to them in order to authorize their own discourses on art and politics, and to buttress their identity as writers in a period when female authorship generated intense controversy. Taking references to Staël and her texts as a starting point opens fresh perspectives on German women's novels, while at the same time revealing their authors' participation in the broader European women's literary tradition. Whereas several novels from the first decade of the century echo Delphine by uniting domestic fiction with political themes, Staël's epoch-making novel of female poetic genius, Corinne, left a more lasting literary legacy in a tradition of German female artist novels. Corinne exemplified the creative woman's dilemma between fame and love, and subsequent German novelists explore this conflict, while several also emulate Staël's myth-making in Corinne as a strategy for attributing transcendent genius to their heroines. Reading for subtexts of female self-expression and development brings to light counter-narratives of female creative transcendence, often evoked through allusions to mythological figures. Martin suggests a revision of German literary history by uncovering a neglected tradition of artist novels positioned between the German Künstlerroman and Staël's newly inaugurated international dialogue on women's role in public culture.
Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture challenges a model of literary production that persists in literary studies: the so-called Geniekult or the idea of the solitary male author as genius that emerged around 1800 in German lands. A closer look at creative practices during this time indicates that collaborative creative endeavors, specifically joint ventures between women and men, were an important mode of literary production during this era. This volume surveys a variety of such collaborations and proves that male and female spheres of creation were not as distinct as has been previously thought. It demonstrates that the model of the male genius that dominated literary studies for centuries was not inevitable, that viable alternatives to it existed. Finally, it demands that we rethink definitions of an author and a literary work in ways that account for the complex modes of creation from which they arose.
