Six key texts by contemporary women writers are read afresh by leading critics, using insights from poststructuralist and new materialist feminist theory. Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf, and Elfriede Jelinek have long been prominent in the fields of Austrian modernism, GDR writing, and avant-garde Austrian literature. The innovative work of Anne Duden, Herta Müller, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar sets out to challenge dominant models of German identity. Focusing on the body and suffering, they explore textual representations of trauma, national identity, and displacement. Haines and Littler's readings of these distinguished and complex female authors offer new avenues for discussion. Both critics and their subjects cast a sceptical eye over existing notions of subjectivity in relation to language, gender, and race. Together, they spark controversy and comment, in an increasingly important debate.

Explores nationality, gender, and postmodern subjectivity in the work of five German-speaking women writers who embody a "nomadic ethics." How can postmodern subjectivity be ethically conceived? What can literature contribute to this project? What role do "gender" and "nation" play in the construction of contemporary identities? Nomadic Ethics broaches these questions, exploring the work of five women writers who live outside of the German-speaking countries or thematize a move away from them: Birgit Vanderbeke, Dorothea Grünzweig, Antje Rávic Strubel, Anna Mitgutsch, and Barbara Honigmann. It draws on work by Rosi Braidotti, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Butler to develop a nomadic ethics, and examines how the writers under discussion conceptualize contemporary German and Austrian identities -- especially but not only gender identities -- in instructive ways. The book engages with a number of critical issues in contemporary German studies: globalization; green thought; questions of gender and sexuality; East (and West) German identities; Austrianness; the postmemory of the Holocaust; and Jewishness. In this way, Nomadic Ethics offers a valuable contribution to debates about the nature of German studies itself, as well as insightful readings of the individual authors and texts concerned. Emily Jeremiah is Lecturer in German, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Six key texts by contemporary women writers are read afresh by leading critics, using insights from poststructuralist and new materialist feminist theory. Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf, and Elfriede Jelinek have long been prominent in the fields of Austrian modernism, GDR writing, and avant-garde Austrian literature. The innovative work of Anne Duden, Herta Muller, and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar sets out to challenge dominant models of German identity. Focusing on the body and suffering, theyexplore textual representations of trauma, national identity, and displacement. Haines and Littler's readings of these distinguished and complex female authors offer new avenues for discussion. Both critics and their subjects cast a sceptical eye over existing notions of subjectivity in relation to language, gender, and race. Together, they spark controversy and comment, in an increasingly important debate.

The profound political and social changes Germany has undergone since 1989 have been reflected in an extraordinarily rich range of contemporary writing. Contemporary German Fiction focuses on the debates that have shaped the politics and culture of the new Germany that has emerged from the second half of the 1990s onwards and offers the first comprehensive account of key developments in German literary fiction within their social and historical context. Each chapter begins with an overview of a central theme, such as East German writing, West German writing, writing on the Nazi past, writing by women and writing by ethnic minorities. The authors discussed include Günter Grass, Ingo Schulze, Judith Hermann, Christa Wolf, Christian Kracht and Zafer Senocak. These informative and accessible readings build up a clear picture of the central themes and stylistic concerns of the best writers working in Germany today.

Unique in its breadth of coverage, Who's Who in Contemporary Women's Writing is a comprehensive, authoritative and enjoyable guide to women's fiction, prose, poetry and drama from around the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Over the course of 1000 entries by over 150 international contributors, a picture emerges of the incredible range of women's writing in our time, from Toni Morrison to Fleur Adcock- all are here. This book includes the established and well-loved but also opens up new worlds of modern literature which may be unfamiliar but are never less than fascinating.

Essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which German women's literature has been conceived.

Recent scholarship has broadened definitions of war and shifted from the narrow focus on battles and power struggles to include narratives of the homefront and private sphere. To expand scholarship on textual representations of war means to shed light on the multiple theaters of war, and on the many voices who contributed to, were affected by, and/or critiqued German war efforts. Engaged women writers and artists commented on their nations' imperial and colonial ambitions and the events of the tumultuous beginning of the twentieth century. In an interdisciplinary investigation, this volume explores select female-authored, German-language texts focusing on German colonial wars and World War I and the discourses that promoted or critiqued their premises. They examine how colonial conflicts contributed to a persistent atmosphere of Kriegsbegeisterung (war enthusiasm) that eventually culminated in the outbreak of World War I, or a Kriegskritik (criticism of war) that resisted it. The span from German colonialism to World War I brings these explosive periods into relief and challenges readers to think about the intersection of nationalism, violence and gender and about the historical continuities and disruptions that shape such events.