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First comparative study of an unlikely group of authors: 18th-century women peasants.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Part 1 Back to nature - bourgeois aesthetic theory and lower-class poetic practice: visionaries - the artist as servant, god, or vegetable window shoppers, the servant as artist. Part 2 The wild and the civilized - poet making: the wages of suffering and the wages of sin - class issues and literary patronage; "menial maids, with no release from toil" - some paradigms; "the poet's silence is the triumph of taste" - the case of Anna Louisa Karsch; "drive your cows from the foot of Parnassus" - the case of Ann Yearsley. Part 3 The life as the work - counterfeit confessions, bogus biographies, literary lives: Arcadian shepherdesses and toiling peasants - on poetry and poverty; the German Sappho - controversies surrounding a legend; a man or a mother? Anna Louisa Karsch forgets her gender; beauty and the beasts - fairy-tale imagery; unhappy endings - biographical punishment. Part 4 A literature of labour - poetic images of country life: physical labour and poetic "idleness"; rural realities I - pastoral landscapes and village scenes; rural realities II - the rustic at work; pastorals and power - social and aesthetic considerations. Part 5 Inspired by nature, inspired by love - two poets on poetic inspiration: the rural muse - on nature inspiration and book learning; under love's spell - authors and readers. Part 6 Of patrons and critics - reading the bourgeois reader: reading the reader - of critics and posterity; castle-building - of patrons and their empty promises.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
SUSANNE KORD is George M. Roth Distinguished Professor of German at Georgetown University. Her book Little Detours: The Letters and Plays of Luise Gottsched was published by Camden House in 2000.
