The Goethe era of German literature was dominated by men. Women were discouraged from reading and scorned as writers; Schiller saw female writers as typical 'dilettantes'. But the attempt to exclude did not always succeed, and the growing literary market rewarded some women's determination. This study combines archival research, literary analysis, and statistical evidence to give a sociological-historical overview of the conditions of women's literary production. Highlighting many authors who have fallen into obscurity, this study tells the story of women who managed to write and publish at a...

This book combines a Nietzschean reading of Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu with a Proustian reading of Nietzsche's philosophy. It focuses on the problem of knowledge, the status of the self, the experience of transcendence, and the complex time structures in the works of the two writers.

"Bluebeard," in which women are slaughtered by a monstrous husband and their bodies hidden in a horrible chamber, is the most hair-raising of tales; yet with its happy ending, it also has a utopian force. This book, the first such full-length study in any language, considers Bluebeard texts as a seismograph of gender politics and of the process of civilization from seventeenth-century France to 1990s Germany, in a broad range of canonical and non-canonical texts.

This book considers how and why German authors have used the child's viewpoint to present the Third Reich. Authors as diverse as Gunter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, and Christa Wolf have all used this perspective, and this raises the question as to why it is such a popular means of confronting the Third Reich. This study asks whether it is an evasive strategy, a means of gaining new insights into the era, or a means of discovering a new language. This raises issues central to the post-war German aesthetic.
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Locating the greatest Italian poet of the twentieth century, Eugenio Montale, firmly within European Modernism, this book examines the struggle with language that is central to his work. In its unravelling of the inexpressibility paradox, the book offers a new reading of Montale's early verse, and reveals how in articles and metapoetic comments Montale gives us insights into both his poetics and the whole process of expression.

This is not only the first study to offer a detailed comparison of historical and literary discourses in the GDR, but also the first to illuminate relations between three topics popular in East German women's writing: the National Socialist past; the lives of historical women; and the use of mythical themes and forms to voice critiques of history.

This is the first study to highlight the significance of nuns' writings in early modern Germany. Combining scholarly analysis with illuminating case studies--such as an abbess's account of the Reformation, a prioress's diary from the Thirty Years' War, and a biography of a fifteenth-century visionary--Charlotte Woodford introduces the much neglected female historians of the era, and sets their writings in an historical and literary context.

To explore literary silence is to explore the relationships between literary texts and the silence of the ineffable. Philosophical and critical accounts tend to operate with a dualistic understanding of silence as the negative other of text. This study, however, seeks to place silence within the literary text. Central to this theoretical endeavor are thinkers like Blanchot, Derrida, Gadamer and Vattimo, and the result is a fundamental challenge to our ideas of silence and text.

This book examines afresh the web of similarities and differences between music and poetry using works by Mallarme and Debussy as case studies. It challenges the easy metaphorical impressionism that has characterized much of the scholarly literature to date. Analyzing Mallarme's vision of a shared musico-poetic aesthetic, Elizabeth McCombie derives a set of performative structural motifs, analytical tools that express our experience of the two arts and their middle ground.
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In this broad-ranging study, Richards examines the representation of women's illness in German fiction by women 1770-1914. In the context of medical history, she focuses particularly on female self-starvation and wasting diseases, illustrating how the "wasting heroine" both reinforced and challenged popular notions of female fragility.