The Contested Quill: Literature by Women in Germany, 1770-1800.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-APR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association

The Contested Quill: Literature by Women in Germany, 1770-1800. By RUTH P. DAWSON. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 415 pp. 42 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-87413-762-4 (hbk).

The title of this study refers to the conflicting discourses of the eighteenth century relating to women's writing. The primacy of the non-intellectual in women's lives, summed up in sewing and spinning, is challenged as the century progresses by the increasing numbers of women who for shorter or even longer periods put down the needle and take up the quill, an object that becomes representative in their hands of their transgression of accepted boundaries and their wish to take...

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