Women Write Back explores the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's responses to texts written by well-known Enlightment figures. Hilger investigates the authorial strategies employed by Karoline von Günderrode, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Julie de Krüdener, and Helen Maria Williams, whose works engage Voltaire's Mahomet, Johnson's Rasselas, Goethe's Werther, and Rousseau's Julie. The analysis of these women's texts sheds light on the literary culture of a period that deemed itself not only enlightened but also egalitarian.
Exploring 18th-century medicine's construction of individuals with non-standard sexual anatomy as “hermaphrodites”, this book focuses on the genre of the case history from three different languages and national contexts-British, French, and German. Medicalizing Difference examines case studies written about Anne Grandjean, Michel Anne Drouart, Maria Dorothea Derrier, and an unnamed “Angolan hermaphrodite.” Multiple case studies were published about each of these individuals and are discussed throughout the book's four chapters, each of which focuses on one momentous epistemological shift in the eighteenth-century: an increasing focus on empiricism and the related professionalization of medicine, the expanding market for popular scientific literature, changing notions about generation and reproduction, and the exploration of foreign territories. This book reads these case histories against the grain and historicizes 18th-century medicine's construction of the category of the “hermaphrodite”, demonstrating that, rather than describing a fact, these histories created their subject of study
In the wake of the French Revolution, history was no longer imagined as a cyclical process in which the succession of ruling dynasties was as predictable as the change in the seasons. Contemporaries wrestled with the meaning of this historical rupture, which represented both the progress of the Enlightenment and the darkness of the Terreur. French authors discussed the political events in their country, but they were not the only ones to do so. As the effects of the French Revolution became more palpable across the border, German authors pondered their implications in newspapers, political pamphlets, and historiographical treatises. German women also participated in these debates, but they often embedded their political commentary in literary texts because they were discouraged, and sometimes even barred, from publishing in explicitly political and public venues. As such, literature, in the sense of belles lettres, had a compensatory function for women: it allowed them to engage in political discussion without explicitly encroaching on certain domains that were perceived as a male preserve. As women writers explored the uses of literature for political commentary they adapted major literary genres in order to consolidate their position in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary sphere. Those genres included domestic fiction, the historical novel, historical tragedy, autobiography, the Robinsonade,and the Bildungsroman. Women writers challenged the images of women traditionally portrayed in these genres: dutiful daughter, submissive wife, caring mother, tantalizing mistress, angelic figure, and passive victim. Gender and Genre discusses six women writers who replaced these traditional female types with women warriors and emigrants as protagonists in texts published between 1795 and 1821: Therese Huber, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, Christine Westphalen, Regula Engel, Sophie von La Roche, and Henriette Frölich. These authors’ protagonists question traditional images of passive femininity, yet their battered bodies also depict the precarious position of women in general, and women writers in particular, during this period. Because women writers were attacked by their male counterparts who attempted to halt their foray into the literary marketplace, these texts are as much about power dynamics in the German literary establishment as they are about French politics.
Women Write Back explores the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's responses to texts written by well-known Enlightment figures. Hilger investigates the authorial strategies employed by Karoline von Günderrode, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Julie de Krüdener, and Helen Maria Williams, whose works engage Voltaire's Mahomet, Johnson's Rasselas, Goethe's Werther, and Rousseau's Julie. The analysis of these women's texts sheds light on the literary culture of a period that deemed itself not only enlightened but also egalitarian.
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