From Royal Chamber to Bedroom ? Imaginations of Female Sovereignty in German Women Writers' Literature between Ancien Régime and Modernity.

Women disappeared from public political life after the French Revolution. Their participation in politics was foreclosed by their civil subordination and relegation to the private sphere. For more than thousand years female sovereignty had been a political possibility throughout Europe's Ancien Regime. But in the long nineteenth century, with its angst-ridden gender dichotomies, political discourse erased women’s participation in or even association with sovereignty. The present project investigates how this radical transition was perceived and dealt with in the work of women writers during the long 'state of exception' (Agamben) in Germany, a period that was sparked by the French Revolution and only came to an end in the years after the 1848 Revolution. How did women writers absorb this change in hegemonic structure? How did they deal with the eclipse of female sovereignty and what traces did the latter leave in their work? The focus of this project is the search for imaginations of female sovereignty in a broad range of literary texts by women writers. It's aims are (1) to disclose the political potential of a body of texts that has received little scholarly attention, and (2) to yield a more complex understanding of templates of political hegemony by looking through the lens of those who were excluded from participating in it.