Introduction

Summary

THROUGHOUT HUMAN HISTORY and in all forms of human society, the existence of two sexes and the social organization of their relationship to each other have generated a diversity of concepts and meanings, ideal characteristics and qualities, that come together in abbreviated form in the gender terms “masculine” and “feminine.” What masculinity and femininity mean in any given society is, among other things, mediated through culturally symbolic forms such as art, dance, music, and literature. This book is an investigation of gender as a culturally symbolic category in a sequence of major literary works by key German-language writers in the period since 1945. Conceived as a comparative study of works by male and female authors, the book focuses on the way gender has played into the conceptualization and representation of human subjectivity within European modernity since the Enlightenment — and how notions of the masculine and the feminine interact in literary works from the post-1945 period that critique the culturally predominant masculine-connoted conceptualization of subjectivity and historical agency. I argue that the critique of masculinity, as the condensed expression of the cultural values of Enlightenment modernity, and the projection of the feminine, as the symbolic site of resistance to those values, underlie gender's function as a symbolic category in the literature of the postwar era and also shape writers' conceptualization of their own gendered positions as authors.