Description

What is a woman author? The early 20th century saw the emergence of a new concept, Frauendichtung (women's writing), a mode of discourse that fundamentally reframed the question of female-and thus also, by contrast, of male-authorship. The paradigm of women's writing as it emerged on the threshold to modernity, when it was associated with a kind of timeless knowledge, has been at best cursorily treated in extant scholarship. It is at the focus of the present study, which traces its astonishing longevity-if only at the level of implicit knowledge-up until the present day. The book concludes with an analysis of current debates on gender, authorship, and canonicity. Methodologically, it draws on post-structural techniques of discourse and myth analysis, paratext theory, and praxeology.