Women's literature

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Women's literature refers to a genre of both fiction and essay literature that can be broadly described as literature by women, about women, or for women. In view of the extremely changeable conceptual history, which is dependent on various literary and feminist paradigms , none of these criteria can be regarded as completely binding. Above all, the term made up of “women” and “literature” conveys a sub-category of literature in which the counterpart “men's literature” has not been provided for or is only used marginally and as critical.

Concept history

The terms "women's literature" and "women's novel" established themselves as journalistic and bookselling categories in the late 19th century increasingly authors appeared that the writing auffassten not only as a day job, but linked primarily an artistic ambitious expression of will with their work. In the 30s of the 20th century the label “women's novel” was discovered as a bestseller, numerous publishers brought novel series under titles such as “women's novels”, “the cultivated women's novel” and the like. out, and the term became almost synonymous with " booklet or penny novel " and " trivial literature ".

The term underwent a double change in the second half of the 20th century. First, it was expanded into a blurred general term that called almost everything was' in any manner to do with women, for example, Fontane's so-called "women's novels" Youth books and Pensionatsgeschichten as Emmy of Rhodens The Trotzkopf , the writings of the medieval mystics or modern life support and advice literature . Occasionally, all entertaining fiction of the 19th century was referred to as “women's literature”, according to the - now revised - literary-sociological view that novels were written exclusively for women and only read by them. On the other hand, in the context of the “ New Women's Movement ” in the 1960s to 80s, the term was partially narrowed to feminist-emancipatory works, be it of a fictional or essayistic nature.

If one wants to establish an approximate general trend in the development of the term in the course of the 20th century, one can perhaps say that the term today rather refers to literature written by women authors, in earlier decades more to literature with female protagonists (e). Today there are also retrospective authors from the 18th century (such as Sophie von La Roche and Therese Huber ), Romanticism (such as Sophie Mereau ), Junge Deutschland and Vormärz (such as Fanny Lewald and Louise Otto-Peters ) and the numerous novelists and short story authors of bourgeois realism categorized as "women's literature". A canonization of paradigmatic authors of the 20th century (not only in the German language) was promoted by the series “Die Frau in der Literatur” and “Das Jahrhundert der Frau” published by Ullstein and Suhrkamp from the 1980s .

In feminist literary criticism of the 1980s, there was a long and ultimately unsolved debate about whether there was a specific 'female writing' or not (and if so, whether it should be linked to the category of 'sex' or 'gender' ) ). It can certainly be said that a historically specific experience of reality enters into the nature of a literary work and that a 'female perspective' work can therefore show significant differences compared to a 'male perspective' contemporary work. The debates also led to a critical reflection on the term “women's literature” itself, and it was found that the very need for such a term was symptomatic of the fact that the term “literature” (without the addition of “women's”) apparently does not is a neutral term, but rather starts from a conception of reality in which the man and the masculine represent the norm, while the woman and the feminine appear deficient as “the other” - the “abnormal”.

Since the 1990s, in the course of the advancing “ post-feminism ” , the term has again tended to expand, which is particularly noticeable in the more recent derivatives of the term (such as “ women's crime ”). In current literary criticism, this well-worn and ambivalent category of “women's literature” is rather avoided. B. of “literary fräuleinwunder ” when discussing new publications by women authors.

History of German-language women's literature

Women's literature as an exception and niche phenomenon

The first women in Europe appeared as authors as early as the High and Late Middle Ages, with sacred or courtly writings being the focus. The representatives of court literature include the Franconian Dhuoda , the French Marie de France , the Italian Christine de Pizan and the Bohemian Helene Kottannerin . Elisabeth von Lothringen translated four French novels into Old High German, including Hug Schapler . Eleanor of Scotland translated the Norman saga of Pontus and Sidonia into the language of her Tyrolean court. Numerous nuns and abbesses were highly educated at the same time and were active as translators, poets and authors of spiritual writings. Hugeburc , Hrotsvit , Ava , Herrad von Landsberg and Hildegard von Bingen are among the most famous . In the era of German women's mysticism , the nuns of the Helfta monastery and today often unknown Dominican women emerged as authors of monastic teachings as well as biographical sister books and graces of grace . For the first time, many monastery writings were literature that was written by and for women, even if the circle of readership was naturally very small.

In the epoch of humanism , the northern European bourgeoisie and nobility began to try to include women in the male-dominated scholarly world and upbringing - in Italy, the motherland of the Renaissance , this was already often the case in the upper classes. In the fictional figure of Magdalia, Erasmus of Rotterdam idealized a learned woman who beats the narrow-minded and chauvinistic abbot Antroninus with the weapons of logic and sophism. The misogynistic arguments of the abbot included a plethora of prejudices that were widespread well into modern times: women who have studied are sterile, lose their innocence and the little brain that God would have given them, which is why women are only allowed to do manual labor and housekeeping. Real counterexamples in favor of the humanistically educated woman of the bourgeoisie were Caritas Pirckheimer , Margaret Roper , Margarete Peutinger and the Italian, who teaches in Heidelberg, Olympia Fulvia Morata . Women also participated in and during the Reformation through their literary work, including Katharina Zell , Argula von Grumbach , Elisabeth von Braunschweig-Lüneburg , Anna Ovena Hoyer and Magdalena Heymair .

In view of the religious struggles and the end of the first heyday of humanism, women who were active as writers in the 17th century were still only conceivable with male tolerance and support. The scholars Anna Maria Schürmann , Maria Cunitz , Maria Sibylla Merian remained just as exceptional as the aesthetic poets and writers Maria Catharina Stockfleth , Sophie Elisabeth von Mecklenburg , Sibylle Ursula von Braunschweig-Lüneburg and Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg . The emerging pietism gave women the opportunity to unite in lay circles on religious issues, which Anna Maria Schürmann also decided to do. The new female spirituality was often dismissed as a dangerous crush, which is why Schürmann defended the religious women's movement with her two-volume pamphlet Eukleria and thus won new followers. Other theological writers were Johanna Eleonora Petersen , Anna Vetter and Beata Sturm , now in print, albeit with different responses .

The 18th century saw the Enlightenment with Christiana Mariana von Ziegler , a wealthy poet who wrote cantatas for Johann Sebastian Bach , for the first time as a woman in a German scholars' association, Gottsched's German Society and with an imperial crown of poets . Gottsched's wife Luise Adelgunde was also active in literature. Other examples of authors from this period were Sidonia Hedwig Zigarunemann and Anna Louisa Karsch .

Women's literature in its own genre, popular works and mass markets

Sophie von La Roche emerged as one of the first important authors of modern times with her novel Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771). As the first successful German example, he introduced the genre of the sensitive letter novel founded by Samuel Richardson in Germany. Goethe raved about this novel and, in 1774, produced his own work in this genre with The Sorrows of Young Werther . In his role as editor of literary magazines and calendars, Schiller promoted a number of female authors (e.g. Karoline Louise Brachmann and Sophie Mereau ), but a distinction between high-altitude and trivial literature was increasingly established in the classics , in which women were clearly on the losing side. It is therefore typical for the authors of Romanticism that until the 1790s they were often only known as 'Frau von' and often enough only by their first names: Cornelia Schlosser , Caroline Flachsland , Minna Körner , Charlotte von Kalb . The author Karoline von Günderrode is an exception because it was canonized early on .

A new approach emerged in the politically turbulent times of Junge Deutschland and Vormärz . An early feminist literature based on the English and French models emerged here (e.g. Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelleys and Olympe de Gouges ), the most important representatives of which are Fanny Lewald and Louise Otto-Peters . The lyrical works of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff stand out during the restoration period . These promising beginnings, however, were largely forgotten again when a previously unprecedented female breadwinner was established in bourgeois realism . Women discovered writing as a source of income. A high percentage of the enormous production of novels and short stories in the second half of the 19th century (especially for so-called “family papers” such as Die Gartenlaube or Westermannsmonthshefte ) is due to the female pen. The Marlitt contributed in particular to the increase in circulation of the “Gazebo” . Other bestselling authors of this era were Nataly von Eschstruth , Marie Nathusius , Louise von François and Hedwig Courths-Mahler .

Around the turn of the century 1900, a new female art literature developed within this mass production, which now consciously linked to the forerunners of the early 19th century. More and more artistically ambitious novels and narratives emerged, mostly based on the pattern of the development and educational novel . Gabriele Reuter's novel Aus gute Familie (1895) can be seen as the trigger and milestone of this development . At the same time, the authors of individual innovative works were often still dependent on earning their money by writing, so that the work lists of the authors in question are often very extensive and heterogeneous. The fashion wave of female narrative literature was accompanied by a large number of essayistic publications on the contemporary “ women's question ” (e.g. by Hedwig Dohm or Käthe Schirmacher ) and biographies of historically important women. This generation of female authors, who were mostly still socialized in the Wilhelminian era , however, lost importance again when the “New Woman” was discovered as a romantic topic in the 1920s. Bestselling authors of this time are e.g. B. Vicki Baum and Ina Seidel . In the areas of poetry and drama, there were hardly any literary successes by women around 1900. There were not a few who tried, but they were largely ignored by contemporary literary criticism as well as by later literary historiography. It was not until the middle of the 20th century that authors such as Marie Luise Kaschnitz , Marieluise Fleißer and Else Lasker-Schüler made the leap into the literary canon .

A new form of German-language women's literature emerged in West Germany in the 1970s. These are largely testimonials from everyday female life, which, through their often experimental literary form, also reflected on the problem of female productivity and insisted on being noticed. This literary development is related to the emergence of other emancipatory literature such as B. Prisoner, Gay and Migrant Literature. Influential books of this time were e.g. B. Skinning by Verena Stefan and class love by Karin Struck .

Literature collections

Women writers

International classics

German-speaking authors 1750–1870

German-speaking authors around 1900

German-speaking authors of the 20th century

Contemporary German-speaking authors

See also

literature

  • Hanna Behrend: Classical and modern women's literature. Female - male - human (= classic school reading. ). Cornelsen, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-464-60107-2 .
  • Hanna Behrend: Classical and modern women's literature. Female - male - human (= classic school reading. ). Teacher's booklet. Cornelsen, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-464-60106-4 .
  • Gisela Brinker-Gabler (ed.): German literature by women. 2 volumes. CH Beck, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-406-32814-8 (volume 1), ISBN 3-406-33021-5 (volume 2).
  • Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Karola Ludwig, Angela Wöffen (eds.): Lexicon of German-speaking women writers 1800–1945 = German-speaking women writers (= dtv. 3282). Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-423-03282-0 .
  • Walter Fähnders, Helga Karrenbrock (ed.): Authors of the Weimar Republic (= Aisthesis study book. Volume 5). Aisthesis-Verlag, Bielefeld 2003, ISBN 3-89528-383-5 .
  • Sandra Folie: Women's literature . In: Gender Glossar (2016), http://gender-glossar.de/
  • Günter Häntzschel: Women's literature. In: Dieter Borchmeyer, Viktor Žmegač (ed.): Modern literature in basic terms. 2nd, revised edition. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1994, ISBN 3-484-10652-2 , pp. 157-162.
  • Günter Helmes : outbreaks, break-ins, new beginnings: authors of the twenties. In: Waltraud Wende (Ed.): Nora leaves her doll's house. 20th century women authors and their contribution to aesthetic innovation . Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 2000, ISBN 3-476-45239-5 , pp. 88-102.
  • Helga Karrenbrock: “Woman stepping out of the image of man”. On the self-image of writing women in the twenties. In: Walter Fähnders, Helga Karrenbrock (Ed.): Authors of the Weimar Republic (= Aisthesis study book. Volume 5). Aisthesis-Verlag, Bielefeld 2003, ISBN 3-89528-383-5 , pp. 21-38.
  • Erik-Jan Kuipers: The women's literature - an obituary. A contribution about the influence of canon formation on the status of women's literature in the Netherlands. In: AMOS - Electronic tijdschrift voor de neerlandistiek in Central and Eastern Europe (Amos-ETVN). Volume 1, issue 1, 2004 ( full text ( memento of January 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive )).
  • Gudrun Loster-Schneider, Gaby Pailer (eds.): Lexicon of German-language epics and drama by women authors 1730–1900. Francke, Tübingen et al. 2006, ISBN 3-7720-8189-4 .
  • Henning Mehnert: Female inspiration between ecstasy and uterogenesis. In: Renate Baader, Dietmar Fricke (ed.): The French author from the Middle Ages to the present. Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, Wiesbaden 1979, ISBN 3-7997-0716-6 , pp. 13-18.
  • Jutta Osinski: Introduction to Feminist Literary Studies. E. Schmidt, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-503-03710-1 .
  • Ingrid Samel: Introduction to Feminist Linguistics. 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Erich Schmidt, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-503-04978-9 .
  • Inge Stephan: Women's literature. In: Klaus Weimar , Harald Fricke , Klaus Grubmüller, Jan-Dirk Müller (eds.): Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Volume 1: A - G. 3rd, revised edition. de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 1997, ISBN 3-11-010896-8 .
  • Sigrid Weigel : The voice of Medusa. Spellings in contemporary women's literature. Tende, Dülmen-Hiddingsel 1987, ISBN 3-88633-101-6 .

Web links

Wikisource: Texts by women (with evidence of digital copies)  - sources and full texts
Commons : Female writers  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files