Review of the Monograph “Women and Family Life in Early Modern German Literature” by Elisabeth W. Nivre

Abstract

This paper reviews a monograph by the Swedish Germanist Elisabeth Waghall Nivre, “Women and Family Life in Early Modern German Literature”. The monograph is published by Camdan House, edited by James Hardin, 2004. ISBN: 1-57113-197-3. My interest in the monograph stems from its unique area of research: the representation of gender roles in sixteenth-century German-language fiction. Despite the popularity of gender studies and the extensive corpus of works on the history of gender, there are few scholarly works in this particular area. A glance at E. Nivre's monograph allows to argue that although the monograph was published almost twenty years ago, its main observations and conclusions are still relevant today.