This dispensation explores Rose Auslander's poetics through her revision of traditional myths. In many of her short poems, the 20th-century Austrian-Jewish poet is concerned with the creative process. Turning to female predecessors, she revises the role of Eve in the Biblical creation myth and uses images of an archetypal cosmic mother figure and of the Shekhina, a feminine emanation of the divine in the Kabbalah. Out of these revisions of mythology arises a new role for the woman poet, and the maternal imagery leads to an understanding of poetics which I call relational poetics. In close readings, I trace the development from the revision of Eve to the cosmic mother and to a maternal language. Eve is seen as a co-creative female power next to the divine forces of creation. Her transgression makes her a role model for the woman poet, rather than marking her as the archetypal seductive woman. She turns the knowledge acquired from the forbidden tree into the source of poetry which she shares with the world. Thus, she becomes a point of departure for Auslander and provides a bridge to the mother figure. In the mother poems, verbal creation is replaced by water and milk as the medium of creation, and Auslander shifts from the creative competition between God and Eve to the struggle between the cosmic mother and her human daughter. Finally, language takes on the mother role. Maternal voices become part of Auslander's search for a new language as images of the symbiotic relationship between the mother and the child in her womb provide access to these voices. Through the image of giving birth, female reproduction becomes a metaphor for poetic productivity. Auslander's relational poetics thus derives from the close relationship between mother and daughter. The boundaries between self and other are fluid, and in a constant process of exchange, poet and poem create each other anew with every word.

This study presents a selection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German women dramatists and their works. The texts were not located within what we know as literary history, but rather within the context of the contemporary German theatre and the social conditions governing the writing and publishing of plays by women. The majority of these dramatists are unknown today. Research in this area is made more difficult by the widespread anonymity of female playwrights throughout both centuries (of 242 authors, 191 used pseudonyms). This is one of the reasons why a study of their work has yet to be conducted, and the reason why there is more need for a broad and general introduction than for investigations focusing on single authors. Although most of these authors and plays have been forgotten, many can still be located. In my research, I have located approximately 1,600 plays by 242 female playwrights; half of these texts were available through the Interlibrary Loan System in the United States. I have chosen to analyze texts by selected authors in the categories of comedy, drama, tragedy, historical plays, dramas about artists, mythological and biblical plays, dramatic fairy tales and allegories, and children's theatre. The plays are presented in chronological order in each chapter and described with an emphasis on thematic development within the genre. As a point of departure, I have included a description of the conditions of theatre performance in both centuries. The appendices contain biographical information about the fifty dramatists whose works are introduced here (Appendix A) and a complete list of female dramatists, with names (including pseudonyms, stage- and maiden names), dates, dramatic works, and the location of the works (Appendix B). Where applicable, I have supplemented my investigation with related materials by the playwrights themselves or their contemporaries, retaining the emphasis on the dramatists and their plays, since my aim is to make them accessible to our thinking, and to provide future researchers with biographical and bibliographical material on them.