Gender and Genre German Women Write the French Revolution [Paperback]

Focusing on the period from 1795 to 1820, Hilger discusses novels by six womenTherese Huber, Caroline de la Motte Fouqu?, Christine Westphalen, Regula Engel, Sophie von la Roche, and Henriette Fr?lich. These women's works were trivialized by their contemporaries, including Goethe, or were difficult to obtain (they are now available in electronic form). Each of the novels Hilger discusses criticizes exclusionary Enlightenment thinking, failed ideals of fraternity from the French Revolution, and the lack of social welfare for widows or victims of war. In discussing Sophie von La Roches Erscheinungen am see oneida (1798), a novel about noble ?migr?s living alone on an island in Lake Oneida (in upstate New York), Hilger reveals that European and Native American identities remain entirely stereotypical and hopelessly constricting. The prejudices of the society from which people wished to escape persist in a 'new' world that fails to foster intellectual, social, or gender freedom. Hilger also discusses the form, structure, and narrative voices of these novels, their previous commentators, and further avenues for research. Supporting her argument with an extensive bibliography and notes, Hilger offers fruitful approaches to these and similar works, demonstrating how such criticism can help redefine the literary canon. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.Gender and Genre explores the ways in which German women writers used literature, in the sense of belles lettres, to comment on the French Revolution and its aftermath. By doing so, these authors adapted major literary genres and questioned these genres representation of women in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary sphere.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 reprlÓ!