Publisher's Synopsis
Volume 12 ofWomen in German Yearbookopens with a cluster of cross-disciplinary articles. Sara Lennox explores pertinent theoretical issues and introduces articles by historian Atina Grossman, sociologist Myra Marx Ferree, and political theorist Joan Cocks. Three subsequent articles focus on the nineteenth century: Todd Kontje challenges the notion that the Wars of Liberation renewed conservatism regarding gender, Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff presents a new reading of the father-daughter relationship in Kleist’s Marquise of O . . . , and Helen G. Morris-Keitel describes the “cultural work” of Louise Otto’s Castle and Factory.
Barbara Hales analyzes the criminal femme fatale as evidence of Weimar Germany’s deep-seated discomfort with modernity; Kathrin Bower discusses poems by Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer as searches for the (M)other; Charlotte Melin analyzes gender differences in reworkings of the Alice in Wonderland motif; Helgard Mahrdt explores connections between Ingeborg Bachmann’s prose and the cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School; and Frederick A. Lubich interviews the writer Elisabeth Alexander. Two articles focus on cultural differences: Karen Jankowsky reads The Facade by Libuse Monìková, a Czech author writing in German, and Leslie Adelson discusses Eva Demski’s Afra in terms of Afro-German discourse. The volume closes with the editors’ views on the yearbook’s role in creating an “American Germanics.”
