Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 The German novel in the long twentieth century
- 2 Contexts of the novel
- 3 The novel in Wilhelmine Germany
- 4 Gender anxiety and the shaping of the self in some modernist writers
- 5 Franz Kafka
- 6 Modernism and the Bildungsroman
- 7 Apocalypse and utopia in the Austrian novel of the 1930s
- 8 Images of the city
- 9 Women writers in the ‘Golden’ Twenties
- 10 The First World War and its aftermath in the German novel
- 11 The German novel during the Third Reich
- 12 History, memory, fiction after the Second World War
- 13 Aesthetics and resistance
- 14 The kleiner Mann and modern times
- 15 The ‘critical’ novel in the GDR
- 16 Identity and authenticity in Swiss and Austrian novels of the postwar era
- 17 Subjectivity and women’s writing of the 1970s and early 1980s
- 18 The postmodern German novel
- Index
- Series List
17 - Subjectivity and women’s writing of the 1970s and early 1980s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 The German novel in the long twentieth century
- 2 Contexts of the novel
- 3 The novel in Wilhelmine Germany
- 4 Gender anxiety and the shaping of the self in some modernist writers
- 5 Franz Kafka
- 6 Modernism and the Bildungsroman
- 7 Apocalypse and utopia in the Austrian novel of the 1930s
- 8 Images of the city
- 9 Women writers in the ‘Golden’ Twenties
- 10 The First World War and its aftermath in the German novel
- 11 The German novel during the Third Reich
- 12 History, memory, fiction after the Second World War
- 13 Aesthetics and resistance
- 14 The kleiner Mann and modern times
- 15 The ‘critical’ novel in the GDR
- 16 Identity and authenticity in Swiss and Austrian novels of the postwar era
- 17 Subjectivity and women’s writing of the 1970s and early 1980s
- 18 The postmodern German novel
- Index
- Series List
Summary
Thanks to committed and painstaking work by feminist literary historians and academics, it is now widely accepted that women did not first pick up their pens in the twentieth century but that they have always written. Many reasons have been put forward to explain the scarcity of writing by women in previous centuries: sanctions were placed on such activities not deemed suitable for women, and even when women found the time and private space to write, their finished work struggled to be accepted by publishers and the reading public. In any case, women, it was suggested, had little to write about given their supposedly limited 'domestic sphere'.
The patriarchal nature of the publishing industry was one of the obstacles which women writing in the 1970s still had to overcome. At the same time previously ‘private’ or domestic matters were beginning to find heightened political and literary treatment, as exemplified in the feminist slogan, ‘the personal is political’ (‘das Private ist politisch’).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel , pp. 249 - 265Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004