Christa Wolf Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy

Critical Essay by Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy

SOURCE: “Romanticism as a Feminist Vision: The Quest of Christa Wolf,” in New German Critique, No. 64, Winter, 1995, pp. 105–34.

In the following essay, Sayre and Löwy discuss the connections between nineteenth-century Romanticism and Wolf's feminist and anti-capitalist perspective.

Few modern authors have given such powerful expression to the “elective affinity” between Romanticism and feminism as Christa Wolf.¹ When we refer to her as a Romantic writer, we not only take into account her explicit interest in the German Romantic tradition of the early nineteenth century, but also—and above all—her own Romantic worldview [Weltanschauung]. Our interpretation of Wolf's writing is based upon a conception of Romanticism which recognizes it to be not only a literary school from the past, but a worldview that pervades all spheres of culture from poetry and the arts to theology, philosophy, and political thought. Due to its pervasiveness, Romanticism has been a significant cultural...
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