Abstract
This presentation analysed the techniques and forms of German texts written by two female authors in multicultural Prague during the 18th century. While research has frequently discussed other novels, plays, and poetic techniques, longer and shorter texts, especially by women writers in the periphery, have remained relatively unknown.
However, Prague is not one of the "prominent" centres of the European Enlightenment and often referred to as the "late Enlightenment," the city developed a range of innovative texts. Novelist Maria Anna Sagar published Prague's first acknowledged "Originalroman" and was about to establish a new kind of female writing. Sagar's novel, Die Verwechselten Töchter (1771), though anonymous, shows female authorship "entworfen von einem Frauenzimmer" without any male editor (unlike Sophie von La Roche's Fräulein von Sternheim). In Sagar's second novel, Karolinens Tagebuch (1774), she confronts her critics with their ignorance of female literature and rejects the male ways of writing. Her groundbreaking prosaicism even influenced male authors in Prague who tried to imitate her texts. At the same time, playwright Victoria Rupp presents herself as "Übersetzerinn" of her earlier play Miss Jenny in her "rührendes Lustspiel" Marianne, published in 1771, and makes her female authorship quite clear. In a brief preface she discusses the difference between male and female authorship. Her plays describe the struggles of modern women trapped in the social hierarchy and patriarchal prejudice and propagate a feminine way of writing and thinking.
The proposed presentation will familiarize us with a less-considered part of German Enlightenment texts and female agency. A few exemplary texts by both authors were used to show the innovative forms, techniques, and motifs typical of Prague women authors in the 1770s.