IS THERE A TRADITION of women's playwriting in German? Or can we only read theater texts by women in the context of a male-centered literary and theatrical history? Now that painstaking scholarship has shown that dramas by women do exist before the mid-twentieth century, these are the questions being asked by those interested in the “act of transgression” (“Überschreitung der Grenzen”) that writing for the theater — according to Elfriede Jelinek — still equates to for women.

This book addresses the second of those questions in particular, and suggests modes of reading for theater texts by women that do justice to both the dramatic genre and the cultural “otherness” of the female author, which — even if we regard the ghettoization of women's writing as undesirable, and even if we feel we have met the notion of “others” too often — it is not useful to ignore. I am looking for a mode of reading that is literary-historically aware, without taking men's theater as its critical yardstick. If we concentrate on drama by women as a thing in itself, as one fascinating part of the history of Western theater rather than a quirky supplement to drama by men, then patterns can begin to emerge, and the first question — whether there is a tradition of women's playwriting — can start to answer itself.

Any critical investigation is indebted to those critics who have gone before, whether for the inspiration provided by work its writer finds congenial, or for the stimulation culled from disagreement. This book is particularly indebted to the literary-historical recovery work of Susanne Kord (Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Deutschsprachige Dramatikerinnen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert). Anne Stürzer's Dramatikerinnen und Zeitstücke: Ein vergessenes Kapitel der Theatergeschichte von der Weimarer Republik bis zur Nachkriegszeit, Katrin Sieg's Exiles, Eccentrics, Activists: Women in Contemporary German Theater, Dagmar von Hoff's Dramen des Weiblichen: Deutsche Dramatikerinnen um 1800, Anne Fleig's Handlungs-Spiel-Räume: Dramen von Autorinnen im Theater des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert, and Heike Schmid's Gefallene Engel: deutschsprachige Dramatikerinnen im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert demonstrate various modes of reading dramatic texts by women in the context of the literary histories of different periods.