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.
Brings to light unsuspectedly rich sources of humor in the works of prominent nineteenth-century women writers. Nineteenth-century German literature is seldom seen as rich in humor and irony, and women's writing from that period is perhaps even less likely to be seen as possessing those qualities. Yet since comedy is bound to societal norms, and humor and irony are recognized weapons of the weak against authority, what this innovative study reveals should not be surprising: women writers found much to laugh at in a bourgeois age when social constraints, particularlyon women, were tight. Helen Chambers analyzes prose fiction by leading female writers of the day who prominently employ humor and irony. Arguing that humor and irony involve cognitive and rational processes, she highlights the inadequacy of binary theories of gender that classify the female as emotional and the male as rational. Chambers focuses on nine women writers: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Ida Hahn-Hahn, Ottilie Wildermuth, Helene Böhlau, Marie vonEbner-Eschenbach, Ada Christen, Clara Viebig, Isolde Kurz, and Ricarda Huch. She uncovers a rich seam of unsuspected or forgotten variety, identifies fresh avenues of approach, and suggests a range of works that merit a place onuniversity reading lists and attention in scholarly studies. Helen Chambers is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK.
This volume makes the wide-ranging work of German women writers visible to a wider audience. It is the first work in English to provide a chronological introduction to and overview of women's writing in German-speaking countries from the Middle Ages to the present day. Extensive guides to further reading and a bibliographical guide to the work of more than 400 women writers form an integral part of the volume, which will be indispensable for students and scholars of German literature, and all those interested in women's and gender studies.
One of the forgotten nineteenth-century women writers, Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817-1884) was a political activist, writer, and educator who experienced exciting historical times in both Germany and the United States (Wisconsin). Writing on the eve of the German Revolution of 1848, she founded a short-lived revolutionary newspaper and even rode into battle. Later, in exile in the United States, she used her journalistic and oratory skills in support of the women's suffrage and anti-slavery movements. This book is an excellent supplemental reading for women's studies and history classes as well as German literature in translation.
Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other offers new insights into diasporic experiences, encounters and representations. This collection of texts examines diaspora narratives and the ways in which different encounters with the other are represented, as well as how these encounters might be read and interpreted in ethical terms. The anthology explores questions of ethics in narratives of displacement or belonging, nationalist narratives of exclusion and borderline narratives, constructed on the foundation provided by encounters with the cultural, sexual, gendered and ethnic other. The contributors’ aim is to explore questions of responsibility and ethics in the study of diaspora, migration, and alterity from a wide range of perspectives. Following a Levinasian one, if the other is always ultimately transcendental and ungraspable through language, we are required to consider ethics every time we write, read or interpret an encounter with the other.
It has been shown that the total number of women who published in German in the 18th and 19th centuries was approximately 3,500, but even by 1918 only a few of them were known. The reason for this lies in the selection processes to which the authors have been subjected, and it is this selection process that is the focus of the research here presented. The selection criteria have not simply been gender-based but have had much to do with the urgent quest for establishing a German Nation State in 1848 and beyond. Prutz, Gottschall, Kreyßig and others found it necessary to use literary historiography, which had been established by 1835, in order to construct an ideal of ‘Germanness’ at a time when a political unity remained absent, and they wove women writers into this plot. After unification in 1872, this kind of weaving seemed to have become less pressing, and other discourses came to the fore, especially those revolving round femininity vs. masculinity, and races. The study of the processes at work here will enhance current debates about the literary canon by tracing its evolution and identifying the factors which came to determine the visibility or obscurity of particular authors and texts. The focus will be on a number of case studies, but, instead of isolating questions of gender, Gender, Canon and Literary History will discuss the broader cultural context.
Romantic Poetry encompasses twenty-seven new essays by prominent scholars on the influences and interrelations among Romantic movements throughout Europe and the Americas. It provides an expansive overview of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry in the European languages. The essays take account of interrelated currents in American, Argentinian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Canadian, Caribbean, Chilean, Colombian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Norwegian, Peruvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, and Uruguayan literature. Contributors adopt different models for comparative study: tracing a theme or motif through several literatures; developing innovative models of transnational influence; studying the role of Romantic poetry in socio-political developments; or focusing on an issue that appears most prominently in one national literature yet is illuminated by the international context. This collaborative volume provides an invaluable resource for students of comparative literature and Romanticism.SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series’ total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism’s own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age.
This book is about mapping the future of eighteenth-century women’s writing and feminist literary history, in an academic culture that is not shy of declaring their obsolescence. It asks: what can or should unite us as scholars devoted to the recovery and study of women’s literary history in an era of big data, on the one hand, and ever more narrowly defined specialization, on the other? Leading scholars from the UK and US answer this question in thought-provoking, cross-disciplinary and often polemical essays. Contributors attend to the achievements of eighteenth-century women writers and the scholars who have devoted their lives to them, and map new directions for the advancement of research in the area. They collectively argue that eighteenth-century women’s literary history has a future, and that feminism was, and always should be, at its heart. Featuring a Preface by Isobel Grundy, and a Postscript by Cora Kaplan.
Based on the premise that the modem discourse of enlightenment and its self-critique began in the eighteenth century, Impure Reason provides a fresh look at the controversy through cultural, social, and political history, confronting the often abstract theories of a dialectics of enlightenment with concrete historical studies of the Age of Enlightenment. This volume brings together current research on the German Enlightenment in order to familiarize an American audience with the period that gave rise to Lessing, Kant, and Goethe-as well as to other important figures who are practically unknown outside of German studies. Leading scholars on eighteenth-century German society, politics, literature, and culture bring a uniquely American perspective to the project, with critiques that generally have not been voiced in Germany. Their essays, which represent a wide range of attitudes toward enlightenment, cover topics as varied as the debate on colonialism; the difficulties of diversity; the use and abuse of reading; male sexuality in enlightenment self-critique; medicine, patriarchy, and heterosexuality; art and social discipline; disturbed mourning and the Enlightenment's flight from the body; and women possessed by the devil. Modem critics and defenders of enlightenment who are discussed in the essays include Horkheimer and Adorno (who are themselves subjected to a genderbased critique), Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Franvois Lyotard, Manfred Frank, Richard Rorty, and Christa Wolf. Impure Reason will interest scholars in German studies, gender studies, history, philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, and other fields. The volume will also help introduce scholars and other interested readers outside the area of German studies to the particularly German tradition of Enlightenment critique and its status today.
