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Bettina Brentano-von Arnim, the first book in English devoted to Brentano-von Arnim's controversial views on gender, politics, and language theory, continues the process of recent rediscovery of this complex and brilliant author. The book opens with an essay by Christa Wolf on Brentano-von Arnim, revealing connections between the two writers. Other chapters address the issues central in her texts: gender, anti-semitism, social inequity, female bonding, and women in relation to traditional literary genres, language, music, religion, nature, and utopia.
The relationship of the writer Bettina von Arnim (1785-1859) to the protagonists of her letter and conversation books has long intrigued readers and critics. The first sustained reading of Arnim's six major texts written in English, this book investigates the relationship of Arnim to her literary Bettine-figures and the roles - including those of child, friend, lover, mother, writer, and genius - that she assigned to these textual personae. Employing feminist theories of positionality, it demonstrates how Arnim developed various subject positions for both herself and her protagonists. Further, it shows how Arnim's increasing public stature over the course of the 1840s strongly influenced the transformation of her literary namesake from childlike figures who focus primarily on the development of the self into mature women who concern themselves first and foremost with issues of politics and social justice.
This Oxford Handbook celebrates the work of trailblazing women in the history of modern philosophy. Through thirty-one original chapters, it engages with the work of women philosophers spanning the long nineteenth century in the German tradition, and covers women's contribution to major philosophical movements, including romanticism and idealism, socialism, and Marxism, Nietzscheanism, feminism, phenomenology, and neo-Kantianism. It opens with a section on figures, offering essays focused on fifteen thinkers in this tradition, before moving on to sections of essays on movement and topics. Across the volume's chapters, essays examine women's contributions to key philosophical areas such as epistemology and metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, ecology, education, and the philosophy of nature.
This exciting and comprehensive anthology?the first anthology of German women's fairy tales in English?presents a variety of published and archival fairy tales from 1780 to 1900. These authors of these stories used fairy tales to explain their own lives, to teach children, to examine history, and to critique society and the status quo. Powerful and conflicted females are queens, girls on quests, mothers, daughters, magical wisewomen, and midwives to the fairies; they love, hate, murder, save children, fight tyranny, overcome cannibals, and rescue the working poor. ø Jeannine Blackwell's introduction places the tales in their historical, social, and critical context, and Shawn C. Jarvis's afterword presents a thematic analysis of the texts and approaches to reading them in conjunction with other European and American tales.
In the wake of the revolutionary wars, the figure of the cross-dressed woman proliferated in novels, plays, popular tales, and real-life accounts that circulated throughout Germany. Sometimes appearing in soldier's garb and engaging in battle like Joan of Arc, other times donning overalls and plying a trade, and female cross-dresser tested the revolutionary ideas of freedom and equality. Perhaps her most provocative challenge, however, was to contemporary notions of what it meant to be a women or a man.
This monograph spotlights women writers’ contributions to the philosophy of German Romanticism. Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Bettina Brentano von Arnim suggested a new vision for an emancipated community of women that develops through philosophical discourse of Progressive Universal Poetry. Their personal, fictionalized, and literary letters reinvent and retheorize the Romantic notions of sociability, symphilosophy, and sympoetry, as theorized by men, and retheorize the concepts of love. They provided a model for shaping intellectual and cultural life in the modern world while challenging rigid dichotomies of classs, gender, and ethnicity.