Voicing the drowned girl: poems by Hilde Domin, Ulla Hahn, Sarah Kirsch and Barbara Köhler in the German tradition of representing Ophelia

Owen, Ruth J. 2007. Voicing the drowned girl: poems by Hilde Domin, Ulla Hahn, Sarah Kirsch and Barbara Köhler in the German tradition of representing Ophelia. Modern Language Review 102 (3) , pp. 781-792.

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Abstract

The literary reception of Shakespeare's Ophelia figure from Hamlet has a long history. In German, it is predominantly a twentieth-century phenomenon, which extends from the drowned girls of the Expressionist era into contemporary poetry. No matter the variety of suppositions on female loveliness, madness, and morbidity, until the 1980s and 1990s the lyric voice always observes Ophelia as an object pallid and silent. Four women writers Hilde Domin, Ulla Hahn, Sarah Kirsch, and Barbara Köhler have overturned this, however, in poems which instead voice Ophelia, to feminist ends. This article examines how their poems rework the Ophelia myth.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Modern Languages
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PT Germanic literature
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Reception ; Ophelia ; Hamlet ; Hilde Domin ; Ulla Hahn ; Sarah Kirsch ; Barbara Köhler
Publisher:	Modern Humanities Research Association
ISSN:	0026-7937
Last Modified:	03 May 2023 01:52
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/3556

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