Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Deutschsprachige Dramatikerinnen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (review)

288 Book Reviews critics from posing certain questions that would deepen our understanding of this genre. These include: How are women represented in the male Bildungsroman? If the Bildungsroman's primary concern is the interaction between the individual and society, how do women fit into the social fabric and thus influence the upbringing of male progeny (see Saine's helpful discussion of the role of the family in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre)} Does the pattern of a woman's education or psychological development so differ from a man's that the genre is inapplicable to her? Would this variance explain why fewer female Bildungsromane are discussed in this volume? And more broadly, how is bourgeois morality defined and conditioned by the Bildungsroman? Another aspect that would have been fascinating to broach in this volume is how the Bildungsroman, dealing as it does with the development of the individual, dovetails with Freudian psychoanalysis. Friedrich Kittler has explored some avenues in this connection, but much work is left to be done. Questions that could be raised are: How does the Freudian case study reflect the generic structure? How does one deal with the anachronism of reading psychoanalysis into pre-twentieth-century literature? Are there model articles (I can think of one by John Smith that appeared a few years ago in Michigan German Studies) that we can discuss with our students on how to consider the Bildungsroman in terms of mourning and melancholy, Nachträglichkeit, paranoia, or the Lacanian symbolic? Despite such questions, it is less by omission than by its assembly of fine articles that this collection reminds us that the Bildungsroman remains a tantalizing concept and area of investigation. The fact that we have difficulty in locating a single example of the genre makes it all the more intriguing. The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Alice Kuzniar Kord, Susanne, Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Deutschsprachige Dramatikerinnen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart. JB. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung , 1992. Kord's revised and expanded dissertation is the fruit of extraordinarily tenacious and thorough research on women dramatists and their writings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and it merits comparison with the very best work of respected feminist researchers like Gisela Brinker-Gabler. Kord has found over three hundred German-language Dramatikerinnen and ca. two thousand plays, all of whom/which she catalogues in her appendix B (323-441). She has also composed succinct biographical sketches for fifty of these writers and she furthermore provides locations in Germany , the U.S. and Canada for the writings (see 442-67 for her long list of Standorte), making these mostly obscure pieces much more immediately accessible to the reader. Clearly she intends to inspire further research and I am certain that her book will serve as the enabling foundation of a great Goethe Yearbook 289 deal of feminist scholarship for years to come. With her biographical and bibliographical appendices, location list and her excellent bibliography of works on theater, theatrical history and women's participation in literary matters (468-505), Kord has compiled a classic reference work and opened up a sub-field to broad-based scholarly investigation. Though this enormous apparatus is extremely useful—and frankly astonishing —, it is the text itself (11-240) that distinguishes this study to my mind. First of all, Kord is herself an excellent writer and it is a pleasure to read her lively, intelligent prose. Secondly, she has devised important and well-chosen categories for organizing her many (virtually unknown) texts, and within these groupings she is able to make convincing and illuminating distinctions between many of the women's treatments of their subjects and conventional/traditional treatments by men of the times. These distinctions in turn point to differences of opinion apparently formed along gender lines on matters such as marriage, politics, power, family organization and the nature of the act of writing. Kord's decision not to make qualitative value judgments about her texts—or the counter-texts by men (11)—is a wise one that eliminates the need to establish historical, literary or tastebased standards of measurement and allows her to concentrate on the rich material she has assembled. Kord's first concern in characterizing...