| Special publications for a female readership in Germany have been traced as far back as the Reformation. Past research on the women's periodical press has tended to concentrate on reconstructing a supposed historical reality rather than on the aesthetic forms which it adopted and employed. The emancipatory press has been widely assumed to reveal "life really as it really was," while the conventional press has been regarded as upholding a distorted portrait of woman as propagated by the patriarchy. Scholarship devoted to the German women's periodical press up to now has generally reflected this one-sided, socio-historical approach and has ignored the role of literature and literary-critical discourse.;In this study I explore how shifting agendas and goals of the nineteenth-century women's movement influenced the choice of literary texts made by Louise Otto, editor of Die Frauen-Zeitung (1848--1852), Lousie Otto and Auguste Schmidt, coeditors of Neue Bahnen (1866--1919), and Helene Lange, editor of Die Frau (1893--1919), and address the following questions: What kind of literature did the editors include and promote? What does a close reading of the literature reveal? What kind of message is delivered? A feminist one? A revolutionary/democratic one? Perhaps a reinforcement of bourgeois ideals? What motivated a book reviewer's assessment? I respond to these central questions by considering the literary works and the literary-cultural discussions within the framework of the periodical in which they appeared and within the historical and ideological context in which each periodical was published. Finally, the categories of class and gender, canon formation, professionalism, and technology are particularly useful lenses through which to consider periodical literature.;This study builds upon and extends research to date on nineteenth-century women writers in two ways: (1) It analyses the distinctive literary production often labeled trivial, tendentious, or popular and heretofore considered not radical or emancipatory enough to warrant scholarly consideration by engaged feminists, and (2) It investigates the role of literary-critical discourse in the women's periodical press in helping define nineteenth-century female identity. |
