Muriel Cormican 
Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé [PDF ebook] 
Negotiating Identity

Comprehensive view of Andreas-Salomé’s fictional works, focusing on her depictions of women and questions of narrative and identity.


The writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) fascinates scholars of German literature because of her associations with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud and because she was active in the cultural and intellectual vanguardof late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria. Recent editions of her fictional works have garnered wider attention from scholars of literature and theory, particularly those interested in women’s studies, identity politics, and narrative theory. This study analyzes how Andreas-Salomé depicted women in her fictional works just as feminism was emerging, revealing a complex engagement with questions of narrative and identity. More than mere thematic explorations of women’s changing roles in society, her works investigate the concept of identity and its relationship to gender, sexuality, and narrative representation. She is as concerned with a cultural crisis of femininityand masculinity as with the identity crises of her individual women characters. This book offers the best account of Andreas-Salomé’s literary works, de-emphasizing biographical and psychoanalytical perspectives but taking into account the sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts in which they were written. It also adds to contemporary theoretical discourses on gender, feminism, and identity.


Muriel Cormican is Professor of German at the University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia.

Table of Content

Introduction

Woman versus Women: Gender, Art, and Decadence in ‘Der Mensch als Weib’ and
Eine Ausschweifung

Articulating Identity: Narrative as Mastery and Self Mastery in
Fenitschka

Marriage and Science: Discourses of Domestication in
Das Haus

Untamed Woman: Talking about Sex and Self in
Jutta

Motherhood, Masochism, and Subjectivity in
Ma: Ein Portraet

Returning the Gaze: Uppity Women in
Menschenkinder

About the author

MURIEL CORMICAN is Professor of German at the University of West Georgia. She is the author of Women and Gender in the Works of Lou-Andreas Salomé (CH, 2009).