By focusing on Luise Gottsched's extraordinary volume and range of translations, Hilary Brown sheds an entirely new light on Gottsched and her oeuvre. Critics have paid increasing attention to the oeuvre of Luise Gottsched (1713-62), Germany's first prominent woman of letters, but have neglected her lifelong work of translation, which encompassed over fifty volumes and an extraordinary range, from drama and poetry to philosophy, history, archaeology, even theoretical physics. This first comprehensive overview of Gottsched's translations places them in the context of eighteenth-century intellectual, literary, and cultural history, showing that they were part of an ambitious, progressive program undertaken with her famous husband to shape German culture during the Enlightenment. In doing so it casts Gottsched and her work in an entirely new light. Including chapters on all the main subject areas and genres from which Gottsched translated, it also explores the relationship between her translations and her original works, demonstrating that translation was central to her oeuvre. A bibliography of Gottsched's translations and source texts concludes the volume. Not only a major new addition to a growing body of research on the Gottscheds, the book will also be valuable reading for scholars interested more broadly in women's writing, the history of translation, and the literature and culture of the German (and European) Enlightenment. Hilary Brown is Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Luise Gottsched was one of the most prominent translators in eighteenth-century Germany, bringing her countrymen into contact with the work of many key writers, thinkers and scientists in the European republic of letters. Der Lockenraub (1744) was the first German verse translation of Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock (1714), and an impressive achievement at a time when English was still an exotic language in Germany and England largely a terra incognita. The introduction will outline the circumstances which gave rise to this important text and discuss its influence on the development of mock-epic poetry in Germany. The volume will thus underline the crucial role played by translation in shaping German culture during the Enlightenment.

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture challenges a model of literary production that persists in literary studies: the so-called Geniekult or the idea of the solitary male author as genius that emerged around 1800 in German lands. A closer look at creative practices during this time indicates that collaborative creative endeavors, specifically joint ventures between women and men, were an important mode of literary production during this era. This volume surveys a variety of such collaborations and proves that male and female spheres of creation were not as distinct as has been previously thought. It demonstrates that the model of the male genius that dominated literary studies for centuries was not inevitable, that viable alternatives to it existed. Finally, it demands that we rethink definitions of an author and a literary work in ways that account for the complex modes of creation from which they arose.

The 18th century saw the first significant phase of cultural interchange between Britain and Germany. This study examines the part played in this process by women writers, who were entering the literary world in large numbers for the first time. It asks whether women whether a cross-cultural female literary tradition emerged during the period.

This volume of original essays celebrates Barbara Becker-Cantarino, whose prolific publications on German literary culture from 1600 to the twentieth century are major milestones in the field of German cultural studies. The range of topics in the collection reflects the breadth of Becker-Cantarino’s scholarship. Examining literature from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the contributors explore the intersections of gender, race, and genre, history and gender, and gender and violence. They provide fresh readings of the works of known and lesser-known writers, including Cyriacus Spangenberg, Maria Anna Sagers Luise Gottsched, Heinrich von Kleist, Frank Wedekind, Christa Wolf, Helga Schütz, Terézia Mora, and Martina Hefter. Their discussions explore the possibilities and limitations of theoretical discourses on travel literature, deconstruction, and gender and suggest new avenues of investigation.

Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries is a collection of articles that gathers together current work in literary translation to show how research in the field can speak to other disciplines such as cultural studies, history, linguistics, literary studies and philosophy, whilst simultaneously learning from them.

"Gottsched's efforts to involve women in this process have been noted, but in Amazons and Apprentices, Katherine Goodman examines for the first time the Gottsched circle's initiatives regarding intellectual women in the context of the broader discourse of which they were an important part. She presents an array of voices and texts from the years 1715 to 1740, including dictionaries, moral weeklies, letters, translations, and literature."--BOOK JACKET.