Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790-1805 (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 124)

Women Write Back explores the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women’s responses to texts written by well-known Enlightment figures. Hilger investigates the authorial strategies employed by Karoline von Günderrode, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Julie de Krüdener, and Helen Maria Williams, whose works engage Voltaire’s Mahomet, Johnson’s Rasselas, Goethe’s Werther, and Rousseau’s Julie. The analysis of these women’s texts sheds light on the literary culture of a period that deemed itself not only enlightened but also egalitarian.

Stephanie M. Hilger is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and German at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.