The Princess or the Author? Imaginations of Authorship in German Women Writers’ Literature of the Early Nineteenth Century

The figure of the female author has always been of central interest to feminist literary studies, yet this approach has never been without controversy. At the very same time when feminist literary criticism emerged and placed the woman writer at the center of attention, post-structuralists were declaring the author ‘dead’. More recently, under the impulse of Butlerian approaches, the extensive focus on women writers in feminist literary studies is in danger of appearing naively essentialist. This paper will try to demonstrate why, despite these challenges, it is still relevant for feminist criticism to concentrate on the figure of the female author by making a case study from the research on women writers of the early nineteenth century. The German author Johanna Schopenhauer (1766-1838) and her short novel Margaretha von Schottland (1834), a text that has received no scholarly attention until today, will serve as a case in point. It will be the focus of this contribution to investigate if and how Schopenhauer mediates in her fictional work the complex and paradoxical position of female authors, who played an increasingly important role in the modernizing literary business of the early nineteenth century, yet lived in a cultural environment in which ideological discourses excluded women from the position of inventing, creative subjects. How does the literary imagination of authorship differ from articulations in non-literary texts? And how do female authorship, gender roles, and concepts of the body interact? In this way, it will be pointed out how the analysis of a neglected woman writer and a quasi-unknown text can help us to gain a more accurate picture of early nineteenth-century female authorship and can thus, ultimately, help us to re-conceive the dynamics of literary history in general.status: publishe