PUBLISH AND PERISH: WOMEN WRITERS ANTICIPATE POSTERITY

Abstract

How did women writers of the Age of Goethe, most of whom have been forgotten, envision their own posthumous reception? How did this vision influence their understanding of their own authorship, at a time when the work's endurance in posterity began to emerge as one of the most important signifiers of the work's significance as art? Is there a direct correlation between the work's publication as a prerequisite for its endurance and perceptions of its aesthetic 'quality'? The article will trace these issues in one work respectively by three women writers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who can fairly be said to have escaped obscurity: a poem by Anna Louisa Karsch, a play by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and a prose story by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach.