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.

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.

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.

A study of women's writing in the Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic, Austria and Switzerland, 1945-1990.

This volume introduces ten emerging voices in German-language literature by women. Their texts speak to the diverse modalities of transition that characterise society and culture in the twenty-first century, such as the adaptation to evolving political and social conditions in a newly united Germany; globalisation, the dissolution of borders, and the changing face of Europe; dramatic shifts in the meaning of national, ethnic, sexual, gender, religious, and class identities; rapid technological advancement and the revolutionary power of new media, which in turn have radically altered the connections between public and private, personal and political. In their literature, the authors presented here reflect on the notion of transition and offer some unique interventions on its meaning in the contemporary era.