Dimensions of Europe Lunch Lecture by Katrin Dennerlein

We kindly invite you to join the lunch lecture on Tender Mothers, Women Revolutionaries, and a Moon Emperor. Plays by Women in the European Theatrical Field around 1800. by Visiting Fellow Katrin Dennerlein on 21 October starting at 12:00 at Seminar room 67.01 (Elisabethstraße 27/ground floor).

Histories of German drama around 1800 still rest on a small canon of works by male dramatists, even though several hundred women wrote for the stage and many of their plays were performed. This lecture replaces the canon with the literary field as its frame of reference. Drawing on Bourdieu, it reads plays by women as position-takings in a European theatre that stretched between aesthetic autonomy and popular drama with strong ties to contemporary reality. Three case studies show what this shift brings to light. Friederike Sophie Hensel’s Die Entführung (1772) recasts the bourgeois family drama by putting a mother at its centre. Engel Christine Westphalen’s Charlotte Corday (1804) shows that what limited women’s position-takings was not political subject matter but female agency. Comedies by Marianne Sophie Weikard and Friederike Helene Unger openly expose the contrivance of their own happy endings. The lecture concludes by presenting a digital bibliography of plays by women that links works, versions and performances.