The New Woman and the Aesthetic Opening

The New Woman should be understood as a figure connecting nineteenth-century discourses of sexuality and the feminist movement(s) in a discursive response. Her brave redefinition of the gender contract is an indispensable gateway to modern culture. The fin de siècle anticipated postmodernism themes such as unstable male-female identities, the importance of Eros, a queer fantasy of a neuter gender, and the narcissistic game of self-invention as a response to the feeling of loss of collective values. This volume works across the east-west divide, discussing texts by Victoria Benedictsson, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Illa Christensen, Selma Lagerlöf, Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, Karen Blixen, L. Onerva, Elin Wägner, Ida Bäckman, Alexandra Kollontai, Colette, Djuna Barnes, Agnes von Krusenstjerna, Sigfried Siwertz, Karin Boye, Vicki Baum, Tora Dahl, Natasha Goerke, Natasha Tokarczuk, Henning Mankell and Liza Marklund.