Author:

Abstract:

Although the history of literary theory “yields up a litany of complaints against contextualization”, the focus on the contexts of literary works has always dominated literary studies (Felski 573). This also applies to feminist literary criticism, which has devoted a lot of attention to the socio-historical conditions of women’s literary production, to the extent that some critics have asserted that the specific “literariness” of women’s writing has been largely overlooked. My PhD research focuses on the imagination of female sovereignty in works by German women writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. The question of how these writers absorbed the changing political situation of women at the turn of the century in their writing is crucial. Yet this inquiry raises several issues, most essentially: how to assess the relation between text and context? And how can the political potential of these texts be grasped without lapsing into mimetism? A possible answer lies in feminist narratology, one of the various strands within contextualist narratology that search for new ways to approach the relation between the literary text and its context. Subjecting my text corpus to a feminist-narratological reading will reveal how the texts participate in what Ansgar Nünning, among others, has described as a significant potential of literature: narrative texts are involved in the actual generation of alternative world images, attitudes, hierarchies and ways of thinking (61). Although it is not entirely the same, this specific “power” of literary texts can be related to what Jacques Rancière has called “the politics of literature”. Yet, as feminist narratology argues, the intervention of narratives in their broader contexts cannot be understood from a mimetic viewpoint only but requires the application of narratological concepts and models to contextual analysis. Although historical literature by German women writers has repeatedly been proclaimed apolitical, an examination through both a context-sensitive and feminist-narratological approach will reveal that the texts are actively participating in the so-called “redistribution of the sensible”.