The poetics of the "Künstlerinroman" and the aesthetics of the sublime

This study of the poetics of the Romantic K nstlerinroman (female artist novel) brings to the foreground its salient metafictional discourse on the aesthetics of the sublime, ever since its beginnings in Madame de Sta l's Corinne ou L'Italie. The book presents detailed readings of H.D.'s Palimpsest, Christa Wolf's Nachdenken ber Christa T. and Marguerite Duras' L'Amant in a dialogue with Kant, Freud, Lacan, Cixous, Derrida and other philosophers, theorists, literary critics and writers. Each novel is explored in terms of its generic affiliations, its reflections on the role of literature and the writer in society and its aesthetic discourse on the sublime.