Luise Gottsched The Translator

By focusing on Luise Gottsched's extraordinary volume and range of translations, Hilary Brown sheds an entirely new light on Gottsched and her oeuvre. Critics have paid increasing attention to the oeuvre of Luise Gottsched (1713-62), Germany's first prominent woman of letters, but have neglected her lifelong work of translation, which encompassed over fifty volumes and an extraordinary range, from drama and poetry to philosophy, history, archaeology, even theoretical physics. This first comprehensive overview of Gottsched's translations places them in the context of eighteenth-century intellectual, literary, and cultural history, showing that they were part of an ambitious, progressive program undertaken with her famous husband to shape German culture during the Enlightenment. In doing so it casts Gottsched and her work in an entirely new light. Including chapters on all the main subject areas and genres from which Gottsched translated, it also explores the relationship between her translations and her original works, demonstrating that translation was central to her oeuvre. A bibliography of Gottsched's translations and source texts concludes the volume. Not only a major new addition to a growing body of research on the Gottscheds, the book will also be valuable reading for scholars interested more broadly in women's writing, the history of translation, and the literature and culture of the German (and European) Enlightenment. Hilary Brown is Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Both the letters, edited and censored by Runckel, and the plays, commissioned and edited by her husband, reveal a number of intriguing "detours" from the path of conventionality: biographical aberrations in her letters (her chagrined loyalty to her husband, her passionate "friendship" with Runckel) and poetological deviations from her husband's poetics expressed in her dramas."--BOOK JACKET.

Luise Gottsched was one of the most prominent translators in eighteenth-century Germany, bringing her countrymen into contact with the work of many key writers, thinkers and scientists in the European republic of letters. Der Lockenraub (1744) was the first German verse translation of Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock (1714), and an impressive achievement at a time when English was still an exotic language in Germany and England largely a terra incognita. The introduction will outline the circumstances which gave rise to this important text and discuss its influence on the development of mock-epic poetry in Germany. The volume will thus underline the crucial role played by translation in shaping German culture during the Enlightenment.

A new perspective on the principal developments in translation practice and theory in Germany during the Age of Goethe with emphasis on the work of Goethe, Holderlin, and Kleist as translators.

Focuses on women writers as translators who interpreted and mediated across cultural boundaries and between national contexts in the period 1700-1900. Rejecting from the outset the notion of translations as 'defective females', each essay engages with the author it discusses as an innovator.

Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on environmentalism.

Wie aufgeklärt war die europäische Aufklärung im Hinblick auf rechtliche, politische, gesellschaftliche, religiöse und kulturelle Egalitätspostulate für beide Geschlechter, deren Verwirklichung ein ›Zeitalter der Aufklärung‹ allererst in ein ›aufgeklärtes Zeitalter‹ transformieren könnte? Die Beiträge in diesem Band versammeln philosophische, kunstwissenschaftliche, historiographische und philologische (und dabei romanistische wie anglistische und germanistische) Perspektiven auf die Frage, ob und in welcher Weise die Aufklärung tatsächlich feministische Konzepte und Überzeugungen entwickelte.

German women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been the subject of feminist literary critical and historical studies for around thirty years. This volume, with contributions from an international group of scholars, takes stock of what feminist literary criticism has achieved in that time and reflects on future trends in the field. Offering both theoretical perspectives and individual case studies, the contributors grapple with the difficulties of appraising 'non-feminist' women writers and genres from a feminist perspective and present innovative approaches to research in early women's writing. This inclusive and cross- disciplinary collection of essays will enrich the study of German women's writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and contribute to contemporary debates in feminist literary criticism. Anna Richards is Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, University of London. Helen Fronius is College Lecturer in German at Keble College, University of Oxford.