Hermynia Zur Mühlen: The Guises of Socialist Fiction

ISBN-13: 9780199572113 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 240 str.

Ailsa Wallace

Opis

This book undertakes a critique of Hermynia Zur M"uhlen's prose fiction. It uses her biography and contemporary literature as a context for analysing the content and form of her work, and traces continuities and changes in her treatment of political, social, religious, and gender issues. To date, critics have mostly treated Zur M"uhlen in terms of her sensational biography or as an author of socialist fairy tales or exile literature. A full investigation of her work in different genres has been hindered by traditional prejudices about the canon, high art and popular culture and politics. The study begins with Zur M"uhlen's writing in the Weimar Republic. The first section examines her M"arche, Krimis, M"adchenliteratur and autobiography in the context of left-wing literary debates and contemporary inter-war literature. It shows how Zur M"uhlen viewed literature primarily as a political tool and sought to appropriate popular forms of literature to convey socialist ideas to a wide and varied audience in an entertaining fashion. The second section is devoted to Zur M"uhlen's writing in exile. It discusses Zur M"uhlen's early exile fiction written on arrival in Austria, and argues that Zur M"uhlen's attitudes were defined by anti-fascism and her disillusionment with Communism. By tracing continuities and changes in her treatment of social, religious, and gender issues from earlier works, we can assess how exile impacted on her writing and obliged her to experiment with new forms and genres and to recycle old material. It goes on to investigate Zur M"uhlen's 'Austrian Forsyte Sage' and how her conception of it changed in the light of the collapse of central Europe at the end of the 1930s and further exile.
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O autorze

Ailsa Wallace was awarded her D.Phil for her doctorate on Hermynia Zur Mühlen from Jesus College Oxford in 2006. Prior to this she completed her Masters dissertation on the exile works of German-speaking women writers Irmgard Keun, Alice Rühle-Gerstel and Adrienne Thomas. She has published on Mädchenliteratur and her further research interests include Märchen, crime fiction and exile literature.