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This interdisciplinary study, situated at the cross-section of music, literature and gender, examines the woman singer and her song as a literary motif in French and German prose fiction from the 1790s to the mid-nineteenth century. Through selected case studies, this diachronic history of motifs offers a fresh perspective on canonical singer archetypes, such as Goethe's child singer Mignon and Madame de Staël's ground-breaking artist Corinne. The volume also examines lesser known narratives by authors including Caroline Auguste Fischer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hector Berlioz and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, some of which have not been considered critically in this regard before. This allows for a re-evaluation of the significance of the singer motif in musical narratives from the Romantic era to the July Monarchy. The sometimes polemic, often ambivalent, yet always nuanced and multi-layered reflection on the woman singer in literature bears testimony to the complexity of the nineteenth-century musical-literary discourse and its fluid negotiation of gender relations and female performance, fitting well with that ineffable, enigmatic essence of the woman singer herself who, as a literary motif and a cultural icon, continues to resonate and fascinate well beyond the nineteenth century.
List of contents
Contents: Into the Sublime Unknown: Writing Female Song in the 1800s - Archetype or Cliché? Goethe and the Child Singer Mignon in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre - The Plight of the First Woman: Madame de Staël and the Female Performer in Corinne, ou l'Italie - Beyond the Canon: Singing Strategies in the Works of Caroline Auguste Fischer - Between Entgrenzung and Realism: The Romantic Twilight of E.T.A. Hoffmann and George Sand - Realistic Divas: The Singer in the Works of Balzac and Sophie Ulliac-Trémadeure - Finding a Female Narrative: Madame de Thélusson, Madame de Taunay and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore - Hoffmannesque Dénouements: The Nightmare of the Romantic Singer in Hector Berlioz's Euphonia, ou la ville musicale.
About the author
Julia Effertz is a comparative literature scholar and an actress who specializes in women in the literature and culture of the nineteenth century from a comparatist perspective. Her work has appeared in the journals Cahiers Staëliens, Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik and French Studies as well as in the collected volumes Staël¿s Philosophy of the Passions (2013), Musique et littérature: rencontres Sainte-Cécile (2011), Violence in French and Francophone Literature and Film (2008) and Paragraphes: parcours figuratifs et configurations discursives du roman africain (2006).
