Gender, Canon and Literary Historyinvestigates the reception of 19th-century women's writing in German literary histories by way of case studies. It fills a longstanding gap both in the study of ...gender and literary history. The case studies concentrate on the reception of women writing in the Age of Romanticism (e.g., Rahel Varnhagen) as well as women who were inspired to write by the German Revolution (e.g., Fanny Lewald).
It has been shown that the total number of women who published in German in the 18th and 19th centuries was approximately 3, 500, but even by 1918 only a few of them were known. The reason for this ...lies in the selection processes to which the authors have been subjected, and it is this selection process that is the focus ofthe research here presented. The selection criteria have not simply been gender-based but have had much to do with the urgent quest for establishing a German Nation State in 1848 and beyond. Prutz, Gottschall, Kreyßig and others found it necessary to use literary historiography, which had been established by 1835, in order to construct an ideal of 'Germanness' at a time when a political unity remained absent, and they wove women writers into this plot. After unification in 1872, this kind of weaving seemed to have become less pressing, and other discourses came to the fore, especially those revolving round femininity vs. masculinity, and races. The study of the processes at work here will enhance current debates about the literary canon by tracing its evolution and identifying the factors which came to determine the visibility or obscurity of particular authors and texts. The focus will be on a number of case studies, but, instead of isolating questions of gender, Gender, Canon and Literary History will discuss the broader cultural context.
Der Prager Germanist August Sauer wirkte nicht nur im engeren akademischen Rahmen an der dortigen Karl-Ferdinand-Universität, sondern auch in kultur- und wissenschaftspolitischer Hinsicht. Sein ...Einfluss auf die intellektuellen und wissenschaftlichen Diskurse in Böhmen bzw. später der Tschechoslowakei, aber auch auf Habsburg-Österreich insgesamt ist von nicht zu unterschätzender Bedeutung. Der vorliegende Sammelband würdigt August Sauers Werk aus literatur-, kultur- und geschichtswissenschaftlicher Perspektive, bei der der kultur- und wissenschaftspolitische Kontext genauso in den Blick genommen wird wie der engere fachhistorische Rahmen.
ABSTRACT
Writing literary history has been understood as giving a politicised historical account of German culture ever since the inception of this genre in Germany with the publication of the ...Geschichte der poetischen National‐Literatur der Deutschen by Georg Gottfried Gervinus in 1835.1 The concerted view today is that it was the ‘shockwaves’ of the Napoleonic Age which had fuelled a desire to construct an order and propose a unity, at least in book form, which would prevent similar chaos ever happening again, and this intention informed the first histories of German literature.2 This paper will explore the role women were accorded in such histories, and the selection criteria which contributed to their exclusion or gave them the best chance to be included. It examines the intersection of the narrative of German literary history in the service of nation building, women's writing, and ‘Wissenschaftsgeschichte’ from a gendered perspective by comparing how women writers fared in notable works of contemporary literary history just before the events of the German Revolution of 1848/49 (Gervinus) until the unification of Germany in 1872 (Prutz, Gottschall and Kreyßig).
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Johanna Kinkel (1810–58), Malwida von Meysenbug (1816–1903) and Fanny Lewald (1811–89) were three key female thinkers in Germany at the time of the Revolution of 1848/49. This article establishes the ...significance of their little known, in part unpublished, early correspondence and demonstrates the difficulty of any generalising account of ‘women's history’ and ‘women's writing’. The exchanges between the three correspondents are shaped by a series of conflicting attitudes and pressures. On the one hand the correspondents wanted to help create a politically enlightened Germany and thus tended to project images of their addressees or themselves as ‘new women’. On the other hand they were concerned to present, even to one another, a self‐image that conformed to current, rather conservative, social norms and prescriptions. All three women found it difficult to sustain either image under pressure from the conflicts in their daily lives. Some of the reasons for the ultimate disappointment of their hopes for rapid change can be traced in this correspondence.
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9.
Conclusion Whittle, Ruth
Gender, Canon and Literary History,
08/2013
Book Chapter
