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Intelligent weiblichkeit : the correspondence of Charlotte Schiller and Henry Heron

University of British Columbia

This thesis is dedicated to Charlotte Schiller's (neé von Lengefeld, 1766-1826) early correspondence, exchanged with a certain Henry Heron about whom as to present not much has been known. Preliminary archival research was necessary to establish the material basis of this thesis, i.e. dealing with concepts of scholarly editing, or "Editionswissenschaft" (cf. Appendix A), providing first-time full transcriptions of the manuscripts in the holdings of the Goethe- und Schiller-Archive Weimar (cf. Appendix B), as well as tracing back records to gain intelligence of Henry Heron's identity (cf. Appendix C). In the first part, my theoretical approach to Charlotte Schiller and Henry Heron's correspondence, builds on scholarship on gender issues in epistolary culture as provided by Simon Richter, Linda Grasso, Anita Runge, Susanne Kord et al. In my second part, I propose a first-time analysis of Charlotte Schiller's Wallberg, a novel only recently published based on the Weimar manuscript holdings. My interpretation will be focused on the use of letters and documents as literary devices, as well as the intertextual allusions to her earlier aquaintance with Henry Heron regarding motifs of migration from Europe to America within the context of the War of Independence. By revealing the juxtapositions of real-life events and literary imagination in the genres of correspondence and novel, I hope to to shed new light onto Charlotte Schiller's literary strategies, and the role and status of women writers in Weimar, Germany, during the period from 1780-1810, at large.

Text

2016-08-22

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/58922

Germanic Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/