Office: 518 PH
Phone: 319-335-2114
E-Mail: waltraud-maierhofer(at)uiowa.edu
- Selected Publications/Projects
- Courses (including summer 2008 course with travel in Europe)
- Affiliations & Links
- Curriculum Vitae
Goethe and Beyond
“Can Classicist Art Be Fun?" I asked in an article on Goethe’s Italian Journey and Emma Hamilton’s famous, if not notorious performances of attitudes in classical costume, such as longing Iphigenia, mad Medea, a bacchante or fainting Julia (Goethe Yearbook 1999). Goethe’s answer was, of course, a definite no in the sense of Hamilton’s fun, superficial performances. After all, the travel journal as incorporated into his autobiography advertised himself and his “rebirth” as a neo-classical author with an important agenda, or even as the German national author. Yet, for me, it is a lot of good fun.
Research on Goethe and his works and more broadly fiction of the nineteenth-century has been the focal point of my career, starting with my dissertation and first book on Goethe’s last novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, and the Zeitroman or panoramic novel of the mid-nineteenth century (by Immermann and Gutzkow) (Aisthesis, 1990) and articles an works by Goethe and other authors such as Bettine von Arnim, Heinrich Heine, Ricarda Huch, Benedikte Naubert, and Adele Schopenhauer. I also became fascinated with the art of the Age of Goethe, especially the Swiss-born Angelica Kauffmann. I have written an introduction to her life and works, edited her correspondence (Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1999 and Libelle, 2001). Adele Schopenhauer, the neglected sister of the philosopher, wanted to be a painter as well, but received no professional training and later discovered her talent in writing fiction, but became a victim of cancer when she just began to reap success. I published her travel book on Florence (VDG, 2007) with which she hoped to educate and entertain especially women travellers.
The writing of history, especially the representation of historical women and the persistence of traditional images of femininity, is the subject of my monograph Hexen – Huren – Heldenweiber. Bilder des Weiblichen in Erzähltexten über den Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Böhlau, 2005). It encompasses a wide range of narrative texts from the seventeenth century to the present that retell the Thirty Years War.
Looking ahead, I am writing an introduction to German Literature, Deutsche Literatur im Kontext (Focus publishing) which spans the middle of the eighteenth century to the present and draws a lot on my experience of teaching undergraduates here at the University of Iowa.
