Women and German Drama
Subtitle: Playwrights and Their Texts 1860-1945 (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)
Publisher: Camden House
Published: February 3, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9781571132741
Subjects: Plays & playwrights: 19th century; Plays & playwrights: from c 1900 -; Theatre, drama; Women's studies; Theater - Playwriting; History; Women and literature; European - German; Performing Arts; Literature - Classics / Criticism; German; Performing Arts/Dance; History and criticism; Drama; Performing Arts / Film / General; Women Authors; 19th century; 20th century; German drama; Germany
Description: "This book looks in detail at women's playwriting in German between 1860 and 1945, and at its reception by critics. Many of the works considered have never before been analyzed by modern scholarship; others, notably the plays of Marieluise Fleisser and Else Lasker-Schuler, are well known, but are read here for the first time in the context of earlier dramatic work by women.

Sarah Colvin seeks modes of reading that do justice both to the dramatic texts as performance texts, and to the sense of "otherness" experienced by the woman writer in a male-dominated literary and theatrical environment. She concludes that an understanding of the techniques developed by women playwrights of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can enrich our reading not only of Fleisser and Lasker, but of contemporary dramatists such as Jelinek.

If all the world's a stage, playwrights can theoretically be seen as in control of the world they create; this book asks to what extent women dramatists manage to use the space of the drama to reflect the world that they experience."--BOOK JACKET.