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.

Austrian women writers have also become more visible in reference works. Compared to the late seventies, the number of Austrian women writers included in the Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (KLG, Critical Lexicon of Contemporary German-language Literature), for example, has grown considerably.(7) Recent histories of Austrian literature that fail to address the contributions of Austrian women writers are by now inconceivable.(8) Compendia that focus on women writers in the German-speaking world now also present Austrian writers such as Elfriede Jelinek, Barbara Frischmuth, and Marie-Therese Kerschbaumer.(9)

Another notable difference from the late 1970s is the number of English translations of works by Austrian female authors. This growth in translations has greatly facilitated the inclusion of women writers in women's studies courses as well as in general literature/culture courses taught in English.(10) Moreover, the translations have also created the opportunity for non-German (feminist) critics to study these texts within a comparative critical context.(11)