This special issue investigates feminist legacies in the German-language context. In the
nineteenth century, female writers situated at the beginning of the German women’s movement expressed a desire for their work to initiate a generational project.
The achievement of equal democratic rights for men and women was perceived to be a process in which the ‘democratic spirit’ was instilled in future generations through education and the provision of exceptional role models. However, the outbreak of two world
wars, combined with the long-term effects of National Socialism in Germany as well as the division of the country into two distinct political and cultural contexts, entailed the premature collapse of this generational project by the middle of the twentieth
century.
While many of the nineteenth-century authors were rediscovered by the second wave of West German feminism in the 1970s and 80s, very little effort has been made to claim these predecessors for an explicitly German feminist tradition, or to carry on with the
generational project, West Germany’s second wave being predominantly influenced by French and Anglophone feminist theory.
Current scholarship on twenty-first century German feminisms reveals unwillingness amongst new feminist writers to express continuity with historically located feminist forebears. Scholars nonetheless discern the adoption of second-wave writerly strategies
in twenty-first century texts, even as they distance themselves rhetorically and ideologically from second-wave West German feminism. Strikingly, new German feminists remain almost entirely silent with regard to an even earlier nineteenth century tradition
of feminist engagement.
One of the strengths of this special issue includes its approach to the field of enquiry from a comparative, inter-disciplinary perspective, incorporating historical, literary, sociological and gender-discourse analysis.
The issue initiates its investigation of the narrative rupture in German feminism with:
- an initial, critical assessment of the historical mechanisms which might have contributed to
the lack of a feminist tradition specific to Germany in both twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
- a comparative discussion of new Anglo-American feminisms, which in contrast express explicit
indebtedness to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century emancipatory movements,
- an analysis of the search for authority and legitimacy undertaken by contemporary writers when
selecting or refusing to place their work on a continuum with the second wave, the suffragettes and suffragist movements.
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Editors:
Birgit Mikus & Emily Spiers
Contributors:
Birgit Mikus & Emily Spiers,
University of Oxford & St Andrews University
Charlotte Woodford, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge
Caroline Bland,
University of Sheffield
Georgina Paul, St Hilda’s College,
University of Oxford
Margaret McCarthy, Davidson College
Katja Kauer,
Universität Magdeburg/ Universität Fribourg
Cover image:
The image 'I the Woman, I the Art, I the Artist' reproduced with kind permission by the artist, Ikram Guedouar (www.behance.net/perlanegrart)
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