Title Performance and femininity in eighteenth-century German women's writing : the impossible act / Wendy Arons

Edition 1st ed Published New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

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Description 1 online resource (x, 270 pages) Series Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history. Contents "Sophie" and the "Theater" -- Performance as power : the history of Lady von Sternheim -- The performance of a lifetime: Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld -- Antitheatricality and the public woman : Marianne Ehrmann's Amalie : a true story in letters -- The eye of the beholder: Elise Börger's "Aglaja" and F.H. Unger's Melanie, the Foundling -- Play's the thing: Sophie Mereau's "Marie" and "Flight to the city." Summary In Performance and Femininity, Arons examines a series of texts by eighteenth-century German women in order to illuminate how women writers of the time used theater and performance both to investigate female subjectivity and to intervene in the dominant cultural discourse of femininity. Arons's study focuses on works featuring heroines who, for the most part?like their authors?lead lives with public dimensions, primarily by working as actresses. The texts she chooses all call attention to the difficulties that the eighteenth-century conception of the self as sincere and antitheatrical presented for women. By highlighting the fact that the social audience that determines a woman's reputation is almost always a fickle and untrustworthy "reader" of female subjectivity, these works expose the untenable position into which the discourse of sincerity placed women, paradoxically requiring them to perform the very naiveť that was, by definition, not supposed to be performable. Arons's original argument takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies, theatre history, and performance studies, and reveals how these women writers exposed ideal femininity as an impossible act, even as they attempted to reproduce that act in their writing and in their lives Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-261) and index Notes English Print version record Subject Women authors, German -- 18th century German literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism German literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism. Performance in literature. Femininity in literature. LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- German. Femininity in literature German literature German literature -- Women authors Performance in literature Women authors, German Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book ISBN 9780230600737 0230600735 9781349534524 1349534528 1281360740 9781281360748 9786611360740 6611360743

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