Germaine de Staël in Germany. Gender and Literary Authority (1800–1850)

Germaine de Staël and German Women: Gender and Literary Authority (1800-1850) investigates Staël's significance as an icon of female artistic genius and political engagement for two generations of German women, including Caroline A. Fischer, Caroline Pichler, Johanna Schopenhauer, Bettina von Arnim, Ida Hahn-Hahn, and Luise Mühlbach. These authors drew a significant impetus from Staël's exemplary life and writings, especially her influential novels of political and artistic heroines, Delphine (1802) and Corinne, or Italy (1807), referring to them in order to authorize their own discourses on art and politics, and to buttress their identity as writers in a period when female authorship generated intense controversy. Taking references to Staël and her texts as a starting point opens fresh perspectives on German women's novels, while at the same time revealing their authors' participation in the broader European women's literary tradition. Whereas several novels from the first decade of the century echo Delphine by uniting domestic fiction with political themes, Staël's epoch-making novel of female poetic genius, Corinne, left a more lasting literary legacy in a tradition of German…

Издательство

Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Год

2011

Страниц

355

Язык

английский

ISBN

9781611470352