Studies representations of women and death by women to see whether and how they differ from patriarchal versions. In Western culture, women are often linked with death, perhaps because they are traditionally constructed as an unknowable "other." The first two Women and Death volumes investigate ideas about death and the feminine as represented in German culture since 1500, focusing, respectively, on the representation of women as victims and killers and the idea of the woman warrior, and confirming that women who kill or die violent or untimely deaths exercisefascination even as they pose a threat. The traditions of representation traced in the first two volumes, however, are largely patriarchal. What happens when it is women who produce the representations? Do they debunk or reject the dominant discourses of sexual fascination around women and death? Do they replace them with more sober or "realistic" representations, with new forms, modes, and language? Or do women writers and artists, inescapably bound up in patriarchal tradition, reproduce its paradigms? This third volume in the series investigates these questions in ten essays written by an international group of expert scholars. It will be of interest to scholars and students of German literature and culture, gender studies, and film studies. Contributors: Judith Aikin, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Jill Bepler, Stephanie Bird, Abigail Dunn, Stephanie Hilger, Elisabeth Krimmer, Aine McMurtry, Simon Richter, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Clare Bielby is Lecturer in German at the University of Hull. Anna Richards is Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Ingeborg Bachmann (1927-73), one of the most acclaimed German-language poets of the post-war period, famously turned away from the lyric during the 1960s. Publicly declaring that she had stopped writing poetry, Bachmann began work on the prose Todesarten cycle that would dominate the last decade of her life. During a period of personal breakdown in the 1960s, however, she privately continued to write in verse, and the publication of selected drafts in 2000 threw new light on her compositional methods in this period. As the most extensive study to date of the poetic drafts, this monograph leads away from the polemic that surrounded their publication to establish the fragmentary texts as an experimental stage of writing that proved formally and thematically significant for later published prose works. Bridging the genre gap of much Bachmann scholarship, McMurtry illuminates the development of a reflexive mode where sophisticated aesthetic strategies enable the oblique expression of cultural critique. Aine McMurtry is Lecturer in German at Durham University.