Friedrich von Schiller was born in Marbach, Württemberg in an officer family. Schiller studied first law and entered then the newly created medical department, but was dismissed from the academy in 1780 after writing a controversial essay on religion On Relation Between Man's Animal and Spiritual Nature. His first drama, Die Rauber, (The Robbers) published in 1781, about a noble outlaw, Karl Moor, who has rejected the values of his father gained immediate success among young students.
The women’s sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman writing of the 1890s were among the chief literary sensations of their day. They were widely read, heatedly discussed in the newspaper and periodical press, imitated, parodied and, in some cases, adapted for the stage. In short, they were part of the general cultural currency of the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite (or perhaps because of) this fact, the novels and stories at the centre of this study are, on the whole, works which had disappeared from view, or had been relegated to the status of minor historical curiosities, until their rediscovery in the wake of the second-wave feminism of the 1970s.
The narratives I examine in this book use contemporary ideas about love and womanhood but at the same time criticize and challenge such normative trajectories of female development. Understandably, not all women accepted or praised this concept of love’s “evolution”; ideas about love were treated in a variety of ways.
Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis is based on a series of fifteen seminars given at Cambridge University in King’s College and the Social and Political Sciences Faculty from January to July 1987. The series was organized in an attempt to explore the often intense debates that have arisen around psychoanalysis, especially of the Lacanian type, and feminism.
The impact of feminism on literary criticism over the past thirty-five years has been profound and wide-ranging. It has transformed the academic study of literary texts, fundamentally altering the canon of what is taught and setting a new agenda for analysis, as well as radically influencing the parallel processes of publishing, reviewing and literary reception. A host of related disciplines have been affected by feminist literary enquiry, including linguistics, philosophy, history, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, film and media studies, cultural studies, musicology, geography, economics and law.
