ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to establish whether a similar pessimism is justified with regard to feminist scholarship on German women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whether one's field is in decline. It examines the relationship between critical work on early German women writers and feminist criticism more generally, and identifies the recent trends and current emphases in one's field. Feminist literary scholarship soon faced challenges from within and from outside the discipline. French feminist theory was accused of essentialism and of bearing little relation to 'real' women's writing. What emerges clearly from a consideration of publications since the 1980s is that, although scholars often divide the development of feminist literary theory into distinct phases, the history of critical textual work being carried out by feminist scholars in the field displays a good deal of continuity. Certain feminist scholars are now calling for a move away from gender studies back to a more concentrated focus on women and literature.
