Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present

by Watanabe-O'Kelly, Helen

• ISBN13: 9780199558230
• ISBN10: 019955823X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

A regiment of women warriors strides across the battlefield of German culture - on the stage, in the opera house, on the page, and in paintings and prints. These warriors are re-imaginings by men of figures such as the Amazons, the Valkyries, and the bibl

Author Biography

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly is Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford and Professor of German Literature, Oxford. Her publications include Triumphal Shews. Tournaments at German-Speaking Courts in their European Context 1560-1730 (1992), Court Culture in Dresden from Renaissance to Baroque (2002) and The Cambridge History of German Literature (1997), which she edited, and translations of Friedrich Schiller's On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature (1981) and Adalbert Stifter's Brigitta and Other Tales (1989 and 1994). From 2005-2008 she co-directed the AHRC Major Research Project Representations of Women and Death in German Literature, Art and Media 1500 to the present. She is editor of German Life and Letters, the foremost UK German studies journal, and of the German early modern journal Daphnis. Zeitschrift fur mittlere deutsche Kultur.

Table of Contents

Introduction and Acknowledgements
I. Angels of Death - German Culture, Women Warriors, and Heroes
II. Amazons - Warriors or Women?
III. Many Ways to Die - Women Warriors and National Myth
IV. Judith - Asking the Big Questions
V. Death and the Maiden - Heroic Maidens from Schiller to Brecht
VI. Unbecoming a Woman - the Woman Warrior as Cross-Dresser
VII. Women's Imaginings - Warriors in Fiction
VIII. Women's Voices - the Amazons, Judith, Charlotte Corday
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index