From Goethe to Gide: Feminism, Aesthetics and the French and German Literary Canon, 1770-1936

This book brings together specially commissioned essays on twelve canonical male writers from the later Enlightenment to the beginnings of Modernism - six French and six German.

Working with the tools of feminist criticism, leading specialists in Britain and North America demonstrate how feminist readings of key works by Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Fontane, Zola, Kafka, Gide illuminate far more than attitudes to women. The volume raises fundmaental aesthetic questions regarding creativity, genre, realism and canonicity and shows how feminist criticism can revitalize debate on these much-read writers. It therefore foregrounds the major authors who shaped the dominant aesthetics, philosophy and bourgeois culture of European literature between 1770 and 1936.