Charlotte Woodford Libri

In novels written at the end of the long nineteenth century, women in Germany and Austria engaged with some of the most pressing social questions of the modern age. Charlotte Woodford analyses a wide range of such works, many of them largely forgotten, in the context of the contemporary cultural discourses that informed their creation, such as writings on pacifism and socialism, prostitution, birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. Women's experience of contemporary medicine as patients and doctors is a fascinating theme, treated here by several authors. Through a close reading of works by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Minna Kautsky, Gabriele Reuter, Helene BOhlau, Ilse Frapan, Hedwig Dohm, Lou Andreas-SalomE, and others, this study shows how writers' determination to validate women's experience of the problems of modernity informed the aesthetic development of the novel by women.

The late nineteenth century was a crucial period for the development of German fiction. Political unification and industrialization were accompanied by the rise of a mass market for German literature, and with it the beginnings of the German bestseller. Offering escape, romance, or adventure, as well as insights into the modern world, nineteenth-century bestsellers often captured the imagination of readers well into the twentieth century and beyond. However, many have been neglected by scholars. This volume offers new readings of literary realism by focusing not on the accepted iontellectual canon but on commercially successful fiction in its material and social contexts. It investigates bestsellers form writers such as Freytag, Dahn, Jensen, Raabe, Viebig, Stifter, Auerbach, Storm, Möllhausen, Marlitt, Suttner, and Thomas Mann. The contributions examine the aesthetic strategies that make the works such a success, and writers' attempts to appeal simultaneously on different levels to different readers. Writers tried to find freedom and be innovative, while also accommodating the expectations of publishers and the marketplace. This volume sheds light on the important effect of the mass market on the writing not just of popular works, but of German prose fiction on all levels

The literary history of early modern German convents is a much neglected field. Nuns' writings were rarely printed and generally only read within their institution. In this study - the first to highlight the significance of this large body of writing - Charlotte Woodford provides an overview of nuns' literary activities in this period, an examination of how the tradition of monastic history became established in convents, and the variety of ways in which it permitted women to express their creativity. Bringing together for the first time a significant collection of primary source material, Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany also includes a number of illuminating case studies, such as a biography of a fifteenth-century visionary, a prioress's diary, and an abbess's chronicle from the Thirty Years' War. It also offers a valuable reassessment of Caritas Pirckheimer's memoirs, written during the Reformation.