From Goethe To Gide: Feminism, Aesthetics and the Literary Canon in France and Germany, 1770-1936

From Goethe to Gide brings together twelve essays on canonical male writers (six French and six German) commissioned from leading specialists in Britain and North America. Working with the tools of feminist criticism, the authors demonstrate how feminist readings of these writers can illuminate far more than attitudes to women. They raise fundamental aesthetic questions regarding, creativity, genre, realism and canonicity and show how feminist criticism can revitalize debate on these much-read writers. These commissioned essays from individual specialists focus on Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Fontane, Zola, Kafka, Gide. The collection therefore foregrounds the major authors taught on British university BA courses in French and German who also shaped the dominant aesthetics, philosophy and bourgeois culture of European letters between 1770 and 1936. Aimed at final year undergraduates, postgraduates and specialist researchers on these writers Unique in providing a comparative feminist reading of the aesthetics of canonical male works from the literatures of France and Germany, 1770-1936 Provides a major reassessment of some of the literary figures most studied in French and German courses around the world