 | Women Peasant Poets in Eighteenth-Century England, Scotland, and Germany: Milkmaids on Parnassus Subjects: European poetry -- 18th century -- History and criticism; European poetry -- Women authors -- History and criticism; Peasants as authors -- Europe; First comparative study of an unlikely group of authors: 18th-century women peasants. This is the first comparative study of a highly unlikely group of authors: eighteenth-century women peasants in England, Scotland, and Germany, women who, as a rule, received little or no formal education and lived by manual labor, many of them in dire poverty. Among them are the English washerwoman Mary Collier, the English domestic servants Elizabeth Hands and Molly Leapor, the German cowherd Anna Louisa Karsch, the Scottish diarywoman Janet Little, theScottish domestic servant Christian Milne, and the English milkmaid Ann Cromartie Yearsley. Their literature is here linked with one of the major eighteenth-century aesthetic trends in all three countries, the Natural Genius craze, which culminated in highland primitivism in Scotland and England, and in the Sturm und Drang in Germany. Kord's analysis of the peasant women's works and the bourgeois response enables us to find new answers to questionsthat have centrally influenced our thinking about what makes art Art. Kord's book provides a fresh look at some of this fascinating literature, and at the roles and attitudes of the lower classes and of women in the Art world of the day. It also advances a revolutionary thesis: that the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie established itself as the dominant cultural class not primarily, as is commonly held, in opposition to aristocratic culture, but more importantly through its dissociation from and suppression of lower-class art forms. Susanne Kord is Professor and Head of the Department of German at University College London. Her book Little Detours: The Letters and Plays of Luise Gottsched was published by Camden House in 2000. Click here to read an interview with Susanne Kord (Word document 25KB) Kord Susanne : SUSANNE KORD is Professor of German at University College London and has published widely on crime and antisemitism, ethics in horror films, women and violent crime, and many other books and essays on film (especially genre and Hollywood movies), women's literary history and reception, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture. She has received 6 major awards for her writing. In the interest of making some of women's unknown literature available to modern readers, she has edited four collections of plays by women and translated three dramas into English. Her major works include Murderesses in German Writing, 1720-1860 (Cambridge UP, 2013), Lovable Crooks and Loathsome Jews: Antisemitism in German and Austrian Crime Writing Before the World Wars (McFarland, 2018). Her latest book is a short exploration of Drew Goddard's meta-horror film The Cabin in the Woods (2012), forthcoming with Liverpool University Press in 2022. |
