This book charts the entrance of women into public writing in the culturally vibrant world of late eighteenth-century Germany. It gives an absorbing account of the failed autobiography of Friderika Baldinger; the successful fiction, disguised self-narratives, and innovative monthly of Sophie La Roche; the praised poetry of Philippine Englehard; the controversial journalism and novels of Marianne Ehrmann; and the poems and prose about love and suicide by Sophie Albrecht. The book offers a feminist reassessment of the relationship of texts by these eighteenth-century German women writers to traditional literary history and traces how the women changed the cultural discourse of their day.

In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, a small but significant number of German actresses, including Sophie Albrecht (1757-1840), Marianne Ehrmann (1755-1795) and Elise BYrger (1769-1833), began to publish poetry, autobiography, drama and short fiction under their own names. These 'actress-writers' came of age at a time when the status of the actress was beginning to be radically redefined in accordance with Enlightenment aesthetics and the cult of sensibility, as the model of the enterprising actress-director in the tradition of Caroline Neuber gave way to an idealizing view of the actress as sentimental heroine. The Mask and the Quill: Actress-Writers in Germany from Enlightenment to Romanticism, is an exploration of this generation of actress-writers, their significance for German literary and cultural history, and their attempts to come to terms with the new image of the actress through literature and performance. In their texts and performances, Albrecht, Ehrmann and BYrger articulated an entirely new sense of what it meant to be an actress and a woman writer. They identified themselves with the cult of sensibility, with the theater reform movement, and above all with an image of the actress as GefYhlsschauspielerin or 'actress of emotion,' which emerged in the mid-1770s in response to the death of the Hamburg tragedienne Charlotte Ackermann (1757-1775). While some scholars have described this generation as a silent one, forced to submit to increasingly passive ideals of domesticity, actress-writers of the era defied this trend by using the image of the GefYhlsschauspielerin as a passport to literary activity. Their close relationship to theater and the nascent genre of 'paratheatrical literature' provided them with a public voice, access to literary circles and a language with which to articulate their identity as actresses and as writers. More importantly, it provided them with a space from which to critique contemporary notions of gender and virtue. Drawing on the methodologies of New Historicism and discourse analysis, The Mask and the Quill engages in readings of a broad spectrum of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century texts and cultural practices, from autobiographical fiction and lyric poetry to funeral rites and tableaux vivants. Through readings of diverse source material, it sheds light on an underrepresented group whose lives and works resist conventional notions about women's cultural contributions to the Goethezeit and beyond.

In this book, Wendy Arons examines how women writers used theater and performance to investigate the problem of female subjectivity and to intervene in the dominant discourse about ideal femininity. Arons shows how contemporary demands for sincerity and authenticity placed a peculiar burden on women in the public sphere, especially on actresses, who - like professional writers - overstepped the boundaries of what was considered proper behavior for women. Paradoxically, in their representations of ideal women engaged in performance, these writers expose ideal femininity as an impossible act, even as they attempt to perform it in their writing and in their lives.

This volume examines the world of German women writers who emerged in the burgeoning literary marketplace of eighteenth-century Europe.

The Western tradition of excluding women from leadership and disparaging their ability to lead has persisted for centuries, not least in Germany. Even today, resistance to women holding power is embedded in literary, cultural, and historical values that presume a fundamental opposition between the adjective "female" and the substantive "leader." Women who do achieve positions of leadership are faced with a panoply of prejudicial misconceptions: either considered incapable of leadership (conceived of as alpha-male behavior), or pigeonholed as suited only to particular forms of leadership (nurturing, cooperative, egalitarian, communicative, etc.). Focusing on the German-speaking countries, this volume works to dismantle the prevailing disassociation of women and leadership across a range of disciplines. Contributions discuss literary works involving women's political authority and cultivation of community from Maria Antonia of Saxony to Elfriede Jelinek; women's social activism, as embodied by figures from Hedwig Dohm to Rosa Luxemburg; women in political film, environmentalism, neoliberalism, and the media from Leni Riefenstahl to Petra Kelly to Maren Ade; and political leaders Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel. The essays achieve a deeper understanding of the historical roots and theoretical assumptions that inform ideas and realities of German female leadership. CONTRIBUTORS: Dorothee Beck, Seth Berk, Friederike Brühöfener, Margaretmary Daley, Aude Defurne, Helga Druxes, Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, Anke Gilleir, Rachel J. Halverson, Peter Hudis, Elisabeth Krimmer, Stephen Milder, Joyce Marie Mushaben, Lauren Nossett, Patricia Anne Simpson, Almut Spalding, Inge Stephan, Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker. ELISABETH KRIMMER is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. PATRICIA ANNE SIMPSON is Professor of German and Chairperson of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Presenting a broad panorama of society and culture in the German lands and Russia from the Enlightenment to the breakthrough of modernity, this microhistory of one extraordinary family explores how the lives of individual people are entangled with the great forces of their age.

While the relationships between parents and children have long been a staple of critical inquiry, bonds between siblings have received far less attention among early modern scholars. Indeed, until now, no single volume has focused specifically on relations between brothers and sisters during the early modern period, nor do many essays or monographs address the topic. The essays in Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World focus attention on this neglected area, exploring the sibling dynamics that shaped family relations from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries in Italy, England, France, Spain, and Germany. Using an array of feminist and cultural studies approaches, prominent scholars consider sibling ties from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, including art history, musicology, literary studies, and social history. By articulating some of the underlying paradigms according to which sibling relations were constructed, the collection seeks to stimulate further scholarly research and critical inquiry into this fruitful area of early modern cultural studies.

The historical influence of gender on German society and change

The encounter of Jews with the Enlightenment movement has so far been considered almost entirely from a masculine perspective. This highly original study, based on analysis of the correspondence and literary works of a group of educated Jewish women, demonstrates their intellectual proclivities, feminine awareness, and social activities, as well as their attitudes to marriage, traditional family frameworks, and religion. In doing so it makes a significant contribution to German Jewish history as well as to gender studies.

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a network of some fifty women writers, working in French, English, Dutch, and German, staked out a lasting position in the European literary field. These writers were multilingual and lived for many years outside of their countries of origin, translated and borrowed from each others' works, attended literary circles and salons, and fashioned a transnational women's literature characterized by highly recognizable codes. Drawing on a literary geography of national types, women writers across Western Europe read, translated, wrote, and rewrote stories about exceptional young women, literary heroines who transcend the gendered destiny of their distinctive cultural and national contexts. These transcultural heroines struggle against the cultural constraints determining the sexualized fates of local girls. In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women's writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe between 1650 and 1810. Starting with an account of a remarkable tea party that brought together Frances Burney, Sophie von La Roche, and Marie Elisabeth de La Fite in conversation about Stéphanie de Genlis, she excavates a complex community of European and British women authors. In chapters that incorporate history, network theory, and feminist literary history, she examines the century-and-a-half literary lineage connecting Madame de Maintenon to Mary Wollstonecraft, including Charlotte Lennox and Françoise de Graffigny and their radical responses to sexual violence. Neither simply a reaction to, nor collusion with, patriarchal and national literary forms but, rather, both, women's writing offered an invitation to group membership through a literary project of self-transformation. In so doing, argues Cheek, women's writing was the first modern literary category to capitalize transnationally on the virtue of identity, anticipating the global literary marketplace's segmentation of affinity-based reading publics, and continuing to define women's writing to this day.