Book Description
This book treats both the literary history of the modern German novel and theoretical considerations about gender and 18th-century narrative strategies. It attempts to overcome a two-fold division in scholarship by treating Christoph Martin Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon and Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, the two novels generally considered to be foundational in the development of the German Bildungsroman, in conjunction, rather than as examples of unrelated traditions, and by considering the reciprocal influence of fictional and theoretical writing dealing with the developing genre of the modern German novel. Baldwin also examines Wieland's Don Sylvio and Maria Anna Sagar's Karolinens Tagebuch and analyzes how gender as a relative construct functions in each of the four texts. In so doing she shows how the new German novel of the 1770s aligns reading and narrative practices with gendered attributes to establish narrative authority and cultural legitimacy for the new stories of identity they explore. The interpretations proceed from an analysis of the ways that reading and narration are represented in the novels, and in their poetological prefaces, to show that the texts take up, challenge, and contribute to contemporary literary and social theories of the novel. Claire Baldwin is assistant professor of German at Colgate Unversity in Hamilton, New York. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Lily Braun
Lily Braun is today one of the most know German suffragets. Her Fraunefrage(Woman question) is an monumental work and her another works brought her inher time great popularity. An army general daughter who abandoned her familyand bakame a member of a socialist party, a suffragette, pro-choice activist,pacifist, was disowned by family, lived luxury but all her life paid her fathersdebts. This book comes with critical analysis of her works and show how theirideas were changing during Brauns life under different social pressure. From andradical feminist, suffragetteand later socialist after her exlusion from party todevoted mother and later pro war activist.The author also shows that we cannot take everything Braun wrote as a face value beacause in her works is mixed reality and fiction (Dichtung und Warheit) What is missing, but a few pages at thebiginning of the book, is a context in which she was living her life. ... Read more

Book Description
Musarion and Other Rococo Tales by Christoph Martin Wieland is a new translation of some of the most significant prose and verse works by one of the great literary precursors of Goethe.Thomas C. Starnes, one of the world's leading authorities on Wieland's life and works, has provided a marvellous marriage of accuracy and linguistic verve, and he shows that it is not an impossible task to translate German rococo literature into lively English. ... Read more