"Ach, wie wünschte ich mir Geld genug, um eine Professur zu stiften". Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807) im literarischen und kulturpolitischen Feld von Aufklärung und Empfindsamkeit (review)

This volume, based on an international symposium held at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach on the occasion of the 200-year anniversary of Sophie von La Roche's death in 2007, consists of a collection of nineteen articles by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and a bibliography of relevant primary and secondary literature. These contributions are prefaced by an introduction from the editors, two eminent La Roche scholars themselves, Barbara Becker-Cantarino and Gudrun Loster-Schneider.

The articles are grouped in five clusters. The first cluster situates La Roche in the context of literary and intellectual discourses such as "Empfindsamkeit" (article by Gerhard Sauder), Enlightenment cosmopolitanism (Wilfried Barner), stoicism (Monika Nenon), and the concept of virtue (Jutta Osinski, Kevin Hilliard). The second cluster discusses La Roche in relation to turn-of-the-19^th-century authors such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Barbara Becker-Cantarino), Albrecht von Haller (Erdmut Jost), and Gottlieb Konrad Pfeffel (Helmut Schmiedt). The third cluster explores La Roche's construction of a literary self through the presentation of different people and places such as England (Michael Maurer), Paris and London (Gaby Pailer), England and Holland (Linda Kraus Worley), Italy (Ulrike Böhmel-Fichera), and North America (Gudrun Loster-Schneider). The articles in the fourth cluster investigate La Roche's contribution to the field of didactic literature (Reiner Wild, Nina Birkner and York-Gothart Mix, Helga Meise). The fifth and last cluster surveys La Roche's correspondence with various contemporaries such as Johann Heinrich Merck (Ulrike Leuschner), Elisabeth zu Solms-Laubach (Jürgen Vorderstemann), and the family of Johann Friedrich Christian Petersen (Patricia Sensch).

The articles portray La Roche as an author who was deeply embedded in the dense literary and social networks of her time and who, consequently, played an important role not only in the transfer but also in the generation of knowledge in the late Enlightenment. The authors draw connections between La Roche's work and her life to highlight the intersection of public and private spheres for a woman writing and publishing in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. Read individually, each article is fascinating and engaging in itself. Read together, these articles enter into dialogue with each other, both within and across thematic clusters, and thereby paint a detailed picture of this complex figure of the turn-of-the-19^th-century German and European literary scene. The idiom that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts certainly applies to this collection and makes it compelling reading not only for scholars of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century German literature, but also, more generally, for readers interested in German and comparative literature and literature written by women.

Even though there already exists a significant amount of scholarship on La Roche—some of it by contributors to this volume—this collection demonstrates how lively and productive this field of inquiry continues to be. More research remains to be done not only on La Roche's literary oeuvre beyond her canonized Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim but also on the workings of the late eighteenth-century literary sphere. In this respect, a concluding section on directions in La Roche scholarship, possibly based on discussions at the symposium, would have been instructive for the reader interested in further exploring Sophie von La Roche's position on the literary and cultural scene of her time.