Women and Death

The theme of women and death is pervasive in the German culture of the past five centuries. With the conviction that only an interdisciplinary approach can explore a typology as far-reaching and significant as this, and in accordance with the feminist tenet that images are accountable for norms, this volume investigates how iconic representations of women and death came about and why they endure. Traditionally, representations of women as agents of death -- when they have been considered at all -- have been considered separately from women as victims, as though there was no shared thematic ground. Here, familiar depictions of female victims are examined alongside the more unsettling spectacle of women as killers, exposing cultural assumptions. Essays explore, among others, the themes of virgin sacrifice and female infanticides, "Death and the Maiden" in art, female vampires in literature, and women killers in the media. Others compare cultural practices such as female mourning across historical contexts, examining change and the reasons for it. The authors' judgments eschew the simplistic and programmatic, contributing not just to current research in German literature, but also to understanding of cultural history in general.

Contributors: Stephanie Knöll, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Anna Linton, Bettina Bildhauer, Mary Lindemann, Helen Fronius, Anna Richards, Jürgen Barkhoff, Lawrence Kramer, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Clare Bielby, Gisela Ecker.

Anna Linton is Lecturer in German at Kings College London, and Helen Fronius is an AHRC Research Fellow and College Lecturer at Exeter College Oxford.

Details

First Published: 15 Oct 2008
13 Digit ISBN: 9781571133854
Pages: 278
Size: 8.75 x 5.75
Binding: Hardback
Imprint: Camden House
Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture
Subject: German Literature
BIC Class: DSB

Details updated on 04 Feb 2012

Contents

• 1  Death and the Maiden: A German Topic?
• 2  Murdering Mothers in Bible Stories and Fairy Tales in Germany, 1550-1900
• 3  Virgin Sacrifices: Iphigenia and Jepthah's Daughter
• 4  Mourning and Violence: Kriemhild's Incorporated Memory
• 5  Narratives of Dismembering Women in Northern Germany, 1600-1800
• 6  Images of Infanticide in Eighteenth-Century Germany
• 7  Mourning with a Female Heart? Grief and Gender in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany
• 8  Female Vampires, Victimhood, and Vengeance in German Literature around 1800
• 9  Murderous Women in German Opera
• 10  Constructing the femme fatale: A dialogue between Sexology and the Visual Arts in Germany around 1900
• 11  Media Representations of Vera Brühne as femme fatale
• 12  Gender in the Work of Grief and Mourning: Contemporary Requiems in German Literature