Illuminating Intersections: Ten Years of Feminist Criticism on Contemporary Austrian Women Writers.

This review focuses on ten years of feminist reception of selected works written by Austrian women writers from the 1970s through the 1990s, with the exception of Elfriede Jelinek. Taken as a whole, the seondary literature can be categorized roughly under the following rubrics: mother-daughter relations; Austria's National-Socialist past; language and gender; the female other meets the "foreign" other; and intertextual allusions. I have singled out those contributions that provide a foundation for further research and/or suggest new directions. (JV)

In the 1979 preface to a special volume of Modern Austrian Literature devoted to Austrian women writers editor Donald Daviau stated,

 
   In any discussion of Austrian literature today, women writers command 
   considerable attention and are featured along with and aside their male 
   counterparts. Compared to the position of women writers in Austrian letters 
   in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the situation today is 
   unparalleled and unprecedented ("Preface"). 

However, he was quick to note that the secondary literature did not reflect the strong presence of women writers and, thus, the volume was to serve as a corrective and stimulus for further research.

A little over twenty years later, the situation in literary criticism is very different. One rarely finds a volume on German-language literature without articles on Austrian women writers.(1) The major academic journals in the United States feature articles about them(2); the respected British journal German Life and Letters has included feminist criticism on Austrian women writers(3); and in the last decade, dissertations focusing solely or in part on them have appeared yearly in the United States.(4) During the same period, numerous volumes devoted exclusively to a single contemporary Austrian woman writer or to several writers have also been published.(5) In 1991, a feminist collective at the University of Klagenfurt founded the journal SCRIPT, which addresses literature and literary criticism by and about women, most of them Austrian.(6) Clearly, the secondary literature has caught on.