Volume 12 of Women in German Yearbook opens with a cluster of cross-disciplinary articles. Sara Lennox explores pertinent theoretical issues and introduces articles by historian Atina Grossman, sociologist Myra Marx Ferree, and political theorist Joan Cocks. Three subsequent articles focus on the nineteenth century: Todd Kontje challenges the notion that the Wars of Liberation renewed conservatism regarding gender, Irmela Marei Kr_ger-F_rhoff presents a new reading of the father-daughter relationship in Kleist's Marquise of O . . . , and Helen G. Morris-Keitel describes the "cultural work" of Louise Otto's Castle and Factory.Barbara Hales analyzes the criminal femme fatale as evidence of Weimar Germany's deep-seated discomfort with modernity; Kathrin Bower discusses poems by Nelly Sachs and Rose AuslÜnder as searches for the (M)other; Charlotte Melin analyzes gender differences in reworkings of the Alice in Wonderland motif; Helgard Mahrdt explores connections between Ingeborg Bachmann's prose and the cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School; and Frederick A. Lubich interviews the writer Elisabeth Alexander. Two articles focus on cultural differences: Karen Jankowsky reads The Facade by Libuse Mon�kov¾, a Czech author writing in German, and Leslie Adelson discusses Eva Demski's Afra in terms of Afro-German discourse. The volume closes with the editors' views on the yearbook's role in creating an "American Germanics."Sara Friedrichsmeyer is a professor of German at the University of Cincinnati, Raymond Walters College, and the author of The Adrogyne in Early German Romanticism. Patricia A. Herminghouse, a professor of German at the University of Rochester, is the editor of Frauen im Mittelpunkt: An Anthology of Contemporary German Women Writers.

Women in German Yearbook is a refereed publication that presents a wide range of feminist approaches to all aspects of German literature, culture, and language, including pedagogy. Reflecting the interdisciplinary perspectives that inform feminist German studies, each issue contains critical studies involving gender and other analytical categories to examine the work, history, life, literature, and arts of the German-speaking world.Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres is a professor of German at the University of Minnesota. Marjorie Gelus is a professor of German at California State University at Sacramento.

This edition offers the first English translation of Amalia Holst's daring book, On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Education (1802). In one of the first works of German philosophy published under a woman's name, Holst presents a manifesto for women's education that centres on a basic provocation: as far as the mind is concerned, women are equal partakers in the project of Enlightenment and should thus have unfettered access to the sciences in general and to philosophy in particular. Holst's manifesto resonates with the work of several women writers across Europe, including Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Germaine de Staël. Yet in contrast to the early works of feminism we celebrate today, her book had little success. Its reception confronts us with a darker side of the German Enlightenment that, until recently, has been neglected. Holst sought to unearth the gendered nature of the fundamental concepts of the Enlightenment--including vocation, education, and culture--which enabled men to establish the subordinate status of women by philosophical means. However, her argument was scorned by male reviewers, who denied the very possibility of a woman philosopher. With an introduction by Andrew Cooper, and translations of biographical material and early reviews, this edition provides students and scholars of German philosophy with a timely resource for developing a richer understanding of their field, and general readers with a powerful early feminist text that reveals the opportunities and difficulties facing women philosophers at the turn of the nineteenth century.

German women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been the subject of feminist literary critical and historical studies for around thirty years. This volume, with contributions from an international group of scholars, takes stock of what feminist literary criticism has achieved in that time and reflects on future trends in the field. Offering both theoretical perspectives and individual case studies, the contributors grapple with the difficulties of appraising 'non-feminist' women writers and genres from a feminist perspective and present innovative approaches to research in early women's writing. This inclusive and cross- disciplinary collection of essays will enrich the study of German women's writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and contribute to contemporary debates in feminist literary criticism. Anna Richards is Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, University of London. Helen Fronius is College Lecturer in German at Keble College, University of Oxford.

Today, a multiplicity of feminist approaches has become an integral part of the fields of German literary and cultural studies. This comprehensive reference provides a much needed synthesis of the contribution women have made to German literature and culture. In entries for more than 500 topics, the volume surveys literary periods, epochs, and genres; critical approaches and theories; important authors and works; female stereotypes; laws and historical developments; literary concepts and themes; and organizations and archives relevant to women and women's studies. Each entry offers a concise identification of the term, a discussion of its significance, and a bibliography of works for further reading. Today, a multiplicity of feminist approaches has become an integral part of the fields of German literary and cultural studies. While biographical works on women writers exist, this is the first reference to synthesize the wealth of feminist scholarship in German studies. While existing reference works focus exclusively on women authors, this volume contains numerous topical entries and covers the role of women in German literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present day. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on more than 500 topics. While some entries are provided for important women writers and other individuals, the bulk of the volume provides information on literary periods, epochs, and genres; critical approaches and theories; female stereotypes; laws and historical developments; literary concepts and themes; and organizations and archives relevant to women and women's studies. Each entry includes a brief identification of the subject, a discussion of feminist thought on the topic, and a brief bibliography. Entries are written by numerous contributors and reflect a range of critical/theoretical approaches.

Women in German Yearbook is a refereed publication that presents a wide range of feminist approaches to all aspects of German literary, cultural, and language studies, including pedagogy. Each issue contains critical studies on the work, history, life, literature, and arts of women in the German-speaking world, reflecting the interdisciplinary perspectives that inform feminist German studies.

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.

This is the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and multilingual bibliography on "Women and Gender in East Central Europe and the Balkans (Vol. 1)" and "The Lands of the Former Soviet Union (Vol. 2)" over the past millennium. The coverage encompasses the relevant territories of the Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires, Germany and Greece, and the Jewish and Roma diasporas. Topics range from legal status and marital customs to economic participation and gender roles, plus unparalleled documentation of women writers and artists, and autobiographical works of all kinds. The volumes include approximately 30,000 bibliographic entries on works published through the end of 2000, as well as web sites and unpublished dissertations. Many of the individual entries are annotated with brief descriptions of major works and the tables of contents for collections and anthologies. The entries are cross-referenced and each volume includes indexes.