Bøger i Women and Gender in German Studies serien

The first English translation of Fontane's late, posthumously published novel, featuring the eponymous, complex heroine and confronting issues regarding gender roles and marriage that still resonate today.

This volume examines the world of German women writers who emerged in the burgeoning literary marketplace of eighteenth-century Europe.Beginning in the 1770s, the German literary market experienced unprecedented growth. The enormous demand for reading materials that stimulated this burgeoning market created new opportunities for women writers. At the same time, they still faced numerous obstacles. The new opportunities and limitations imposed on women writers are the subject of this book. The eleven essays contained within look beyond the negative strategies women writers employed, such as hiding their intellectual accomplishments or legitimizing their works by subordinating them to non-artistic purposes. Instead, they ask how women wrote about their own creative processes both directly, for example, by sketchinga female poetology, and indirectly, through literary representations of female authorship. This volume examines concepts of female authorship as they are presented in women's correspondence, theoretical statements, and literary works. The contributors bring to life the collaborative literary world of female writers through explorations of familial and professional mentorships, salons, writing circles, and their correspondences. They consider how female authors positioned themselves within contemporary intellectual discourses and analyze the tropes that shaped ideas about their authorship throughout the emerging literary marketplace of eighteenth century Europe. Contributors: Karin Baumgartner, Margaretmary Daley, Ruth P. Dawson, Denise M. Della Rossa, Renata Fuchs, Amy Jones, Julie L. J. Koehler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Sara Luly, Monika Nenon, Lauren Nossett, Angela Sanmann. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis, and Lauren Nossett is Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Randolph-Macon College.

A collection of essays achieving a deeper understanding of the historical roots and theoretical assumptions that inform the realities and fantasies of German female leadership.The Western tradition of excluding women from leadership and disparaging their ability to lead has persisted for centuries, not least in Germany. Even today, resistance to women holding power is embedded in literary, cultural, andhistorical values that presume a fundamental opposition between the adjective "e;female"e; and the substantive "e;leader."e; Women who do achieve positions of leadership are faced with a panoply of prejudicial misconceptions: either considered incapable of leadership (conceived of as alpha-male behavior), or pigeonholed as suited only to particular forms of leadership (nurturing, cooperative, egalitarian, communicative, etc.). Focusing on the German-speakingcountries, this volume works to dismantle the prevailing disassociation of women and leadership across a range of disciplines. Contributions discuss literary works involving women's political authority and cultivation of community from Maria Antonia of Saxony to Elfriede Jelinek; women's social activism, as embodied by figures from Hedwig Dohm to Rosa Luxemburg; women in political film, environmentalism, neoliberalism, and the media from Leni Riefenstahlto Petra Kelly to Maren Ade; and political leaders Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel. Contributors: Dorothee Beck, Seth Berk, Friederike Bruhofener, Margaretmary Daley, Aude Defurne, Helga Druxes, Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, Anke Gilleir, Rachel J. Halverson, Peter Hudis, Elisabeth Krimmer, Stephen Milder, Joyce Marie Mushaben, Lauren Nossett, Patricia Anne Simpson, Almut Spalding, Inge Stephan, Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Explores the process of "e;becoming woman"e; through an analysis of the depiction of girls and young women in contemporary Anglo-American and German literary texts.What does it mean to "e;become woman"e; in the context of neoliberalism and postfeminism? What is the role of will in this process? Willful Girls explores these questions through an analysis of the depiction of girls and youngwomen in contemporary Anglo-American and German literary texts. It identifies four sets of concerns that are vital for an understanding of gendered subject formation in the contemporary context: agency and volition; body and beauty; sisterhood and identification; and sex and desire. The book examines numerous nonfiction feminist texts as well as novels by Helene Hegemann, Caitlin Moran, Charlotte Roche, Emma Jane Unsworth, Kate Zambreno, and Juli Zeh, among others. These texts illustrate the complex processes by which female subjects become women today. Failure, refusal, disgust, and anger are striking features of these becomings. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed (Willful Subjects) and thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Rosi Braidotti, and Elizabeth Grosz, the book demonstrates the significance of willfulness for understandings and assertions of female agency. In addition, it proposesa view of literary works themselves as instances of willfulness. The book will be of interest to scholars working in comparative literature, English, German studies, and feminist, gender, and queer studies. Emily Jeremiah is Senior Lecturer in German and Gender Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.

First English translations of two early feminist short-story collections, shedding light on the "e;woman question"e; at the turn of the 20th century and relating to today's #MeToo movement.This edition provides the first English translations of two short-story collections - Is That Love? (1896) and Innocence: A Modern Book for Girls (1901) - by the Austrian writer Elsa Asenijeff (1867-1941). Primarily remembered as the lover and muse of sculptor and painter Max Klinger, in her time Asenijeff was a widely read author. Both books engage with "e;the woman question"e; at the turn of the twentieth century: Asenijeff thematizes the lack of education and professional opportunities for women and girls, critiques the bourgeois family as a site of patriarchal power, and sheds light on systemic sexual violence. Is That Love?, in particular, dismantles dominant narratives of romantic love and marriage. Written while Asenijeff was living in Bulgaria, and set there, the text also engages with that country's political turmoil. In Innocence, Asenijeff relies on some of the traditional characteristics of Madchenliteratur, educational literature for girls, but also subverts its conventions. In their introduction, the translators explicate the sociohistorical background of both texts, arguing for Asenijeff's importance in the history of women's writing in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-speaking world and placing her within the larger context of the contemporary global #MeToo movement.

The first English translation of a presciently modern portrayal of emerging feminist sensibilities in a nineteenth-century family, by one of Germany's leading pre-First World War writers.Best known now for her involvement with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937) first became famous for fiction and criticism that engaged provocatively with "e;the woman question."e; In recent years, the author's literary treatment of the challenges facing women in a patriarchal society has awakened renewed interest. Anneliese's House is the first English translation of her last and most masterful work of fiction, the 1921 Das Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende vorigen Jahrhunderts (The House: A Family Story from the End of the Nineteenth Century). Anneliese Branhardt, the book's protagonist, long ago renounced a career as a pianist to raise a family with her physician husband, Frank. She worries about her son Balduin - an aspiring poet modeled on Rilke - and about her equally free-spirited daughter Gitta. She is haunted by memories of a daughter who died in childhood and anxious about a risky, late pregnancy. With her domestic harmony threatened by her own stirrings of autonomy and her children's growing independence, Anneliese finds the future both frightening and promising. The edition is fully annotated, with a critical introduction and bibliography.

A collection of essays achieving a deeper understanding of the historical roots and theoretical assumptions that inform the realities and fantasies of German female leadership.The Western tradition of excluding women from leadership and disparaging their ability to lead has persisted for centuries, not least in Germany. Even today, resistance to women holding power is embedded in literary, cultural, andhistorical values that presume a fundamental opposition between the adjective "female" and the substantive "leader." Women who do achieve positions of leadership are faced with a panoply of prejudicial misconceptions: either considered incapable of leadership (conceived of as alpha-male behavior), or pigeonholed as suited only to particular forms of leadership (nurturing, cooperative, egalitarian, communicative, etc.).Focusing on the German-speakingcountries, this volume works to dismantle the prevailing disassociation of women and leadership across a range of disciplines. Contributions discuss literary works involving women's political authority and cultivation of community from Maria Antonia of Saxony to Elfriede Jelinek; women's social activism, as embodied by figures from Hedwig Dohm to Rosa Luxemburg; women in political film, environmentalism, neoliberalism, and the media from Leni Riefenstahlto Petra Kelly to Maren Ade; and political leaders Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel. Contributors: Dorothee Beck, Seth Berk, Friederike Brühöfener, Margaretmary Daley, Aude Defurne, Helga Druxes, Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, Anke Gilleir, Rachel J. Halverson, Peter Hudis, Elisabeth Krimmer, Stephen Milder, Joyce Marie Mushaben, Lauren Nossett, Patricia Anne Simpson, Almut Spalding, Inge Stephan, Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Examines a variety of texts from late Enlightenment Germany to provide a nuanced rethinking of women's roles as wives, mothers, and housekeepers, creators of the cultural spaces of the home.Domesticity, a set of practices, emotions, and values culminating in a nourishing emotional and physical ambience - the "feel" of being at home and belonging - connects one's subjective experience to the material environment. In late Enlightenment Germany, writers from Joachim Heinrich Campe and Theodor von Hippel to Sophie La Roche imagined the home as a space where true "humanity" would be realized. The high-stakes cultural formation of domesticity was part of a complex discourse on the pursuit of happiness as a life well lived. As domesticity became a surrogate for the lost religious certainties of the vanishing pre-modern world, an obsessive anxiety concerning its delineation in discourse suggested its importance but also its fragility and the consequences of its failure.Karin A. Wurst examines didactic novels by female authors, autobiographical texts, popular philosophy, advice literature, periodicals, pedagogical tracts, and household manuals in pursuit of a nuanced rethinking of the relationship between women's roles as wives, mothers, and housekeepers and as creators of the cultural spaces of the home. She finds that the high-value imaginary of domesticity encouraged women's agency insofar as they were tasked with turning theoretical ideals into everyday practice. At the same time, her book shows the under-illuminated contribution of women's work to social and political change from within the patriarchal structures of eighteenth-century Germany.

Examines portrayals of plants and landscapes in recent German novels and films, addressing the contemporary forms of racism, nationalism, and social and ecological injustice that they expose.

This volume of new essays represents a collective, academic, and activist effort to interpret German literature and culture in the context of the international #MeToo movement, illustrating and interrogating the ways that "rape cultures" persist.

Emphasizing the role of and portrayal of emotion, this study argues for the inclusion of six late-eighteenth-century German-language novels by and about women in a revised canon.

By exploring the concept of the "tender gaze" in German film, theater, and literature, this volume's contributors illustrate how perspective-taking in works of art fosters empathy and prosocial behaviors.

Investigates why the question of women's complicity in National Socialism has struggled to capture the collective imagination, examining how a variety of female authors have conceptualized the role of women in the Third Reich