Gender, Memory, and Interculturality in Caroline de la Motte Fouqué’s Historical Novel Die Vertriebenen

Abstract

Caroline de la Motte Fouqué was one of the most productive women writers of the romantic and early Restoration period in Germany. This author of numerous novels and shorter prose has been re-valued by gender-orientated scholarly research as a writer who ‘transgressed a number of gender and class boundaries’.1 As an observer of the Zeitgeist and as a political writer, Fouqué was concerned with women’s role in society and their contribution to the formation of a possible German nation. These political issues are not only discussed in her so-called Zeitromane, but are also central in her historical fiction, where also national and cultural boundaries are constantly crossed. Focussing on Fouqué’s historical novel Die Vertriebenen (1823) [The displaced], the article combines perspectives on gender and intercultural issues to examine the function of narratives of foreign history in Fouqué’s historiographical writing.