Publisher's Synopsis
This study of the poetics of the Romantic Künstlerinroman (female artist novel) brings to the foreground its salient metafictional discourse on the aesthetics of the sublime, ever since its beginnings in Madame de Staël's Corinne ou L'Italie. The book presents detailed readings of H.D.'s Palimpsest, Christa Wolf's Nachdenken über Christa T. and Marguerite Duras' L'Amant in a dialogue with Kant, Freud, Lacan, Cixous, Derrida and other philosophers, theorists, literary critics and writers. Each novel is explored in terms of its generic affiliations, its reflections on the role of literature and the writer in society and its aesthetic discourse on the sublime. The Poetics of the Künstlerinroman and the Aesthetics of the Sublime stages an inquiry into the relation between genre, the sublime, gender and literary history from which emerge insights into the conditions of subjectivity underlying the experience and communication of the sublime.
