Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe

Armed Ambiguity interrogates tropes of the woman warrior constructed by print culture-including press reports, novels, dramatic works, and lyrical texts-during the decades-long conflict in Europe around 1800.

Julie Koser sheds new light on how women’s bodies became a semiotic battleground for competing social, cultural, and political agendas in one of the most critical periods of modern history. Reading the women warriors in this book as barometers of the social and political climate in German?speaking territories, Koser reveals how literary texts and cultural artifacts foregrounding women’s armed insurrection perpetuated or contested the discursive construction and illusionary dichotomization of public versus private spheres along a gendered fault line. Koser illuminates how reactionary visions of ideal femininity competed with subversive fantasies of new femininities in the ideological battle being waged over the restructuring of German society.