Nathalie Rennhack, Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"
Doctoral Research Project

In the years after the revolution, the early American periodical constructed itself as politically and morally superior to the novel. Despite this antagonism, the writers under review in this project – Judith Sargent Murray, Sukey Vickery and Martha Meredith Read – utilised both publication forms. At a time when Republican and Federalist ideology confined women to domestic spaces, the three authors suggested broader roles for women in texts that have been referred to as (radically) feminist while outwardly aligning themselves with the very ideology their writing opposed. Against this backdrop, the project is particularly interested in how competing literary forms and political ideas interact and communicate with each other. Instead of classifying the authors' political beliefs as merely conflicting, it seeks to understand how the texts in question construct their own ideas between alternative modes of publication.

Supervisor: Frank Kelleter (Freie Universität Berlin/EXC 2020)