Select Bibliography on German Social History and Women Writers

Abstract

The works listed in this bibliography were gathered during the preparation of our forthcoming anthology Bitter Healing; German Women Writers from 1700 to 1848. An Anthology in English (University of Nebraska Press, to appear). We looked for works that shed light on the conditions of women's literary production from the Middle Ages through the mid nineteenth century, since no study of women's writing is complete without an understanding of their home life, education, legal and civil rights, and family and economic status. The bibliography has three parts (1) general works on broad aspects of women's literary history; (2) works dealing with the period from the Middle Ages to 1700; (3) general overviews and individual studies of women's education, role in the family, and in the literary market from the Enlightenment to later Romanticism, the period covered by our anthology.