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  • From Goethe to Gide: Feminism, Aesthetics and the French and German Literary Canon 1770–1936
  • Susanne Kord
From Goethe to Gide: Feminism, Aesthetics and the French and German Literary Canon 1770–1936. Edited by Mary Orr and Lesley Sharpe . University of Exeter Press, 2005. x + 262 pp., 5 b&w ills. Hb £47.50 Pb £16.99.

The essays in this collection offer feminist interpretations of twelve canonical French and German writers (Rousseau, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola and Gide on the French side, and Goethe, Schiller, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heine, Fontane and Kafka on the German side). The volume aims not only to take stock of a variety of feminist critical approaches, but also to 'encourage further dialogue within feminist criticism' (p. vii) and to demonstrate the usefulness and sophistication of feminist approaches, presumably to a mainstream audience. The volume takes up themes that have been central in feminist interpretations of both men's and women's literature since the 1970s, among them ambivalent (self-)definitions of art and the artist and genre questions. Individual contributions vary considerably in sophistication, from skilled explorations of potential 'dialogues' between canonical texts and feminist approaches to mere attempts at establishing male authors as progressive 'for their time,' documented by pointing to that author's independent female characters.

What distinguishes this volume from the many earlier feminist re-visions of canonical literature, which can fairly be called one of the main focuses of feminist research since the 1970s, is that it targets as its readership both feminist critics and the mainstream scholarly community. Some of the methodological assumptions of the volume are distinctly mainstream: the canonicity of the twelve authors under discussion is explicitly not questioned (p. 2). Indeed, revitalizing the canon of pre-twentieth-century male greats through feminist approaches, in light of the increasing focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century studies, is one of the book's stated goals (p. 3). Yet the understanding of feminist approaches and their hermeneutical complexity is somewhat one-dimensional. In the Introduction, the complex literary history of feminist criticism is reduced to two rather uninteresting strands — the 'representations of women' strand and the 'uncovering misogyny of major male writers' strand. These are contrasted with feminist approaches that engage with 'central aesthetic questions', incidentally also one of the oldest projects of feminist scholarship. Such juxtapositions are hardly likely to convince a mainstream audience of the sophistication of feminist research. The [End Page 101] author selection is justified by defining these twelve authors as the those 'most studied on French and German courses in Britain and around the world today' (front page) -- in itself a debatable statement --and conversely as authors who have attracted very little feminist scholarship to date (which is true of some and emphatically untrue of others, for instance, Goethe). Major feminist 'classics' on some of these authors appear neither in the discussion nor in the bibliography: among them are the seminal projects by Stephan and Weigel, Cocalis's and Goodman's Beyond the Eternal Feminine and Zantop's work on Heinrich Heine, who is listed on page 3 as an author who seems to invite feminist work but has received very little. While this volume is certainly useful as a collection of alternative readings of texts by mainstream authors, it demonstrates, collectively and in individual contributions, far greater expertise on canonical literature and aesthetics than on the history of feminist literary criticism or on the variety of feminist approaches.

Susanne Kord
University College London
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