Kleist's Female Leading Characters And The Subversion Of Idealist Discourse (Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature)
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
Published: May 16, 2005
Language: eng; ger
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 210
ISBN-13: 9780820474861
Subjects: European - German; General; Movements - General; Philosophy; Literature - Classics / Criticism; 1777-1811; Characters; Kleist, Heinrich von,; Women; Women in literature
Description: "Heinrich von Kleist's problematic relationship with the philosophy and the aesthetics of idealism informs his parodic, rebellious, and destructive oeuvre. This book focuses on this relationship and examines Kleist's female leading characters and their role as amorphous ciphers for his own subversive aesthetic theory. Through parody these characters call into question idealist philosophy regarding truth, knowledge, and gender, and offer a theory of aesthetic representation that replaces traditional binary oppositions with pluralities and nonclosure. Nietzsche may have opened the door to post-modernism; however, Kleist unlocked it with four cunning female voices.

This is the first book in Kleist scholarship to focus solely on Kleist's female leading figures and their symbolic role as both character and literary theory - a theory anticipating Derridean deconstruction."--Jacket.