Book Reviews99 them to endure as well. Throughout her discussion, Gladstein focuses on minor as well as major characters to illustrate the pervasiveness of the indestructible woman. By so doing, she allows, by extension, this "type" of character to enter the universal realm of the archetype, one easily extended to other ambivalent female characters appearing throughout the entire American male canon. Gladstein stresses that "[t]hough these authors have thus deprived woman of her full humanity in the temporal scene of contemporary society, they have assigned her a significant role in the greater drama of the survival of the species" (8). The indestructible woman, although frequently "deprived of her voice" (111), is ultimately redemptive, and by enduring, she thus allows the community at large to endure. HEATHER M. GARONZIK Boise State University HILTRUD GNUG and RENATE MOHRMANN, eds. FrauenLiteratur -Geschichte: Schreibende Frauen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985. 562 p. Two highly respected German scholars have assembled a substantial volume about women writers from the twelfth century to the present. The language areas dealt with comprise German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English, with a token excursus into Russian; geographically the major part of this book deals with Europe and North America; brief ventures into Latin America and Africa depict little more than a sad state of literary affairs for women there. In addition to belles-lettres, the book treats epistolary, travel, autobiographical, and documentary writing by women across the ages. Its better essays are grounded in the socio-historical, ideological, and political contexts in which these women have written or, more recently, expressed themselves in the medium of film. Authors of the 29 essays include some of the outstanding academic authorities in the area of women's studies writing today: Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Kay Goodman, Patricia Herminghouse, Sara Lennox, Margret Briigmann, and the editors themselves, to mention only a few familiar to American Germanists. Four men also contributed; regrettably, two of their articles (one on "Kriminalroman-Autorinnen" is a co-production) are, by reason of superficiality or limited scope, among the book's least commendable. Although the readership of this somewhat unbalanced foray into literary history is limited to those who know German, most of the pieces are written in a straightforward style accessible to those with less than native fluency; Michaela Giesing's convoluted language in her otherwise informative treatise on women in German theater at the turn of the century constitutes a notable exception. Frauen-Literatur-Geschichte is a useful compendium, especially as an introduction to a broad range of women's writing and its varied development. Many of the essays evidence careful analysis and research as well as insight into the achievements and problems of women writers. The editors' foreword states that their aim is to correct standard, national literary histories and lexicons by employing comparative methodology (viii). The organizing principle of the volume is generally according to cultural origin (e.g., "Klöster und Höfe," "GDR"), theme (e.g., "Anklage von Sklaverei und Unterdrückung," "Feministische Aufbrüche"), and genre. Chronology is not strictly adhered to because, the editors maintain, it would be forced in an area 100Rocky Mountain Review where lack of tradition causes lack of continuity in development (ix). Gnüg and Möhrmann further claim: "Es ist nicht das Ziel dieses Unternehmens, eine Galerie großer Dichterinnenportraits zu erstellen und die Werke der hinreichend Bekannten noch einmal in Einzeldarstellungen zu präsentieren" (ix). In addition to their rejection of canon, they want to avoid limiting the material to a positivistic listing of names, dates, works, and facts, and hope that this volume will be understood as a trailblazing work for further studies in women's literature (xiv). All of which is, of course, praiseworthy. It seems the labors of ongoing ground breaking have extracted their price on the Gnüg and Möhrmann book, despite the fact that major parts oí Frauen-LiteraturGeschichte , the material about writers in German, have already been taken up by several of the same essay authors in W. Paulsen's Die Frau als Heldin und Autorin (1979). Explanations and rationalizations in an introduction cannot eradicate the basic, largely editorial problems which distract from the value...