ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the historical development of, and current state of affairs in studies concerned with, respectively, literature produced by women writers and the conditions of female authorship. It also outlines the progression of gender studies, a discipline which has, to some extent, grown and flourished at the expense of the historically oriented women's studies. The chapter discusses future perspectives and possible ways of supplementing and builds on the findings of gender studies specific to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The introduction of gender studies to the German-speaking world took place at the same time as the perspective of feminist literary-historical studies was shifting from a focus on the exclusion of women writers from literary history to their participation in it. Anonymity allows some measure of freedom and it also permits aesthetic play encompassing both the performance and the masquerading of sex.
