Chapter 1 Introduction: Caroline's Daughters: The Actress as Writer Chapter 2 Chapter 1: Inventing the Gefühlsschauspielerin: Charlotte Ackermann (1757-75) Chapter 3 Chapter 2: Stages of Loss: Sophie Albrecht (1757-1840) Chapter 4 Chapter 3: Amalie's Critique of Theatrical Reason: Marianne Ehrmann (1755-95) Chapter 5 Chapter 4: Antique, Modern, and Eternally Beautiful: Elise Bürger (1769-1833) and Salon Performance
Mary Helen Dupree is assistant professor of German at Georgetown University.
The Mask and the Quill is an important contribution to German
studies, gender studies, and performance studies, with quotations
given both in the original German and in English translations. [The
lengthy quotations] complements the ‘feminist recovery project’
Dupree explicitly invokes in her introduction. Dupree’s book offers
a sustained argument on the intersection of women writers and women
actresses, and points to the complexities these women faced in
establishing identities both for society and for themselves. The
trajectory she outlines is compelling, and one might see if this
model applies to other actress writers of the time, as well as to
other women whose identities encompassed more than one public
persona.
*Modern Language Review*
What makes Mary Helen Dupree’s book so valuable is the perfect
synthesisof both approaches. Her main objective is to focus on
female authors who were at the same time actresses and who
represent a new generation of young women 'who came of age at a
time when the status of the actress was beginning to be radically
redefined in accordance with Enlightenment aesthetics and the cult
of sensibility, as the model of the enterprising actress-director
in the tradition of Neuber gave way to an idealizing view of the
actress as a sentimental heroine'. . . .Dupree unfolds a
fascinating, comprehensive, and coherent argument focusing on a
wide range of literary genres of self-expression in order to get a
larger picture of the literary imagination of the actress-writer
circa 1800, starting with the culturally 'imagined' new type of
'Gefühlsschauspielerin' and continuing with the different modes and
forms of 'self-imagining' by Albrecht, Ehrmann, and Bürger.
*Journal Of Germanic Studies*
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