Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture: Literary Joint Ventures, 1750-1850

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Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture challenges a model of literary production that persists in literary studies: the so-called Geniekult or the idea of the solitary male author as genius that emerged around 1800 in German lands. A closer look at creative practices during this time indicates that collaborative creative endeavors, specifically joint ventures between women and men, were an important mode of literary production during this era. This volume surveys a variety of such collaborations and proves that male and female spheres of creation were not as distinct as has been previously thought. It demonstrates that the model of the male genius that dominated literary studies for centuries was not inevitable, that viable alternatives to it existed. Finally, it demands that we rethink definitions of an author and a literary work in ways that account for the complex modes of creation from which they arose.

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Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture contains wide-ranging, thoroughly researched, socio-historically informed explorations of writing and publishing practices between 1750 and 1850 that challenge ingrained assumptions about gender and literary production. By framing authorship in terms of collaboration (as opposed to influence or competition), the volumes contributors offer fresh insights into how 'authority' actually worked in the literary world of that period. The essays also provide valuable historical information about the ways in which gender operated in both the production and consumption of literary artifacts. * Laurie Johnson, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Comparative and World Literature, and Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA *
This collection of essays makes a major intervention into our understanding of the German Sturm und Drang and Romantic periods. The volume offers fascinating insights into literary collaborations between women and men and opens the door to new, complex understandings of authorship that transcend the single-author model. The collaborative projects introduced here enabled women writers to create unique strategies for confronting the power inequities of their time and, by extension, to transform the literary field. * Susan E. Gustafson, Karl F. and Bertha A. Fuchs Professor of German Studies, University of Rochester, USA *
[A] fascinating examination of collaborative practices from the Enlightenment to the years just after the March Revolution of 1848. ... Impressive in their scope and depth, the essays in this volume not only provide innovative analyses of collaborative relationships during the Sturm und Drang and Romantic periods but also raise profound questions about creativity and authorship that will interest scholars curious about German literature and literary production at the turn of the nineteenth century. * Feminist German Studies *
The editors of this volume demonstrate that intergender collaboration was more frequent and more significant than is generally assumed ... Most of the contributors refrain from merely memorializing the less familiar member of the creative duo or trio, preferring to identify the shifting qualities of each partnership and avoid presenting them as one-sided. There is universal consensus that the phenomenon of co-authorship is complex and hard to define. * Modern Language Review *

Author Bio

Laura Deiulio is Associate Professor of German at Christopher Newport University, USA. She has published essays on Lou Andreas-Salom, Esther Gad, and Rahel Levin Varnhagen's correspondences with Pauline Wiesel and Auguste Brede. John B. Lyon is Professor of German at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. He is the author of Crafting Flesh, Crafting the Self: Violence and Identity in Early 19th Century German Literature (2006) and Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2013).