In the wake of the French Revolution, history was no longer
imagined as a cyclical process in which the succession of ruling
dynasties was as predictable as the change in the seasons.
Contemporaries wrestled with the meaning of this historical
rupture, which represented both the progress of the Enlightenment
and the darkness of the Terreur. French authors discussed the
political events in their country, but they were not the only ones
to do so. As the effects of the French Revolution became more
palpable across the border, German authors pondered their
implications in newspapers, political pamphlets, and
historiographical treatises. German women also participated in
these debates, but they often embedded their political commentary
in literary texts because they were discouraged, and sometimes even
barred, from publishing in explicitly political and public venues.
As such, literature, in the sense of belles lettres, had a
compensatory function for women: it allowed them to engage in
political discussion without explicitly encroaching on certain
domains that were perceived as a male preserve. As women writers
explored the uses of literature for political commentary they
adapted major literary genres in order to consolidate their
position in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
literary sphere. Those genres included domestic fiction, the
historical novel, historical tragedy, autobiography, the
Robinsonade, and the Bildungsroman. Women writers challenged the
images of women traditionally portrayed in these genres: dutiful
daughter, submissive wife, caring mother, tantalizing mistress,
angelic figure, and passive victim. Gender and Genre discusses six
women writers who replaced these traditional female types with
women warriors and emigrants as protagonists in texts published
between 1795 and 1821: Therese Huber, Caroline de la Motte Fouque,
Christine Westphalen, Regula Engel, Sophie von La Roche, and
Henriette Froelich. These authors' protagonists question
traditional images of passive femininity, yet their battered bodies
also depict the precarious position of women in general, and women
writers in particular, during this period. Because women writers
were attacked by their male counterparts who attempted to halt
their foray into the literary marketplace, these texts are as much
about power dynamics in the German literary establishment as they
are about French politics.
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