Armed ambiguity : women warriors in German literature and culture in the age of Goethe /

Koser (Univ. of Maryland) begins this intriguing book by considering the myths associated with bellicose women, and in chapter 1 she looks at how women in the "age of Goethe" appeared in the popular press. In chapter 2 she analyzes Charlotte Corday (1768-93) as an example of females whose actions arose out of the French Revolution. Koser then discusses warrior women who were "defenders of the 'domestic' good," a group that includes such positive figures as Dorothea from Goethe's epic poem Hermann and Dorothea (1797); warrior women as liberators and "(proto)feminists," for example characters in the fiction of Therese Huber, Karoline von Günderrode, and Caroline Fouqué; and women warriors as Amazons, specifically Penthesilea, who is an extreme example of the warrior woman but essential to understanding in general and to understanding Heinrich von Kleist's eponymous drama of 1808 in particular. Finally, in the epilogue Koser uses Carl von Clausewitz's On War (1832) as a springboard to contrast women warriors in the literature of the Goethezeit with modern women, in various walks of life and in literature, who have stepped outside societal expectations. In so doing she establishes the continuing relevance of this subject and the need for study of its ongoing implications. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Erlis Glass Wickersham, Rosemont College