“WOMEN’ WRITING” AS AN AREA OF DISCOURSIVE, GENRE AND NARRATIVE CONFLICTS (A CASE STUDY OF GERMAN-LANGUAGE FEMALE PROSE OF THE LATE XIX – EARLY XX CENTURY)

The paper focuses on the phenomenon of “women’s writing”, a discussion about which began in the 1970s. Based on Elaine Showalter’s concept of “doubled-voiced discourse” as well as on Franco Moretti’s theory of literary forms development from the center to the periphery, which generates unstable compromises in the structure, its “cracks” and gaps, the article offers an interpretation of “women’s writing” as an area of increased conflict. The case study of three literary works of the late XIX – early XX century written in German language – Elsa Asenijeff’ essay “Women’s Riot and the Third Sex” (1898), Lou Andreas-Salomé’s novella “Fenitchka” (1898) and Minna Wettstein-Adelt’s novel “Are These Women? A Novel about the Third Sex” (1901) – demonstrates conflicts of discourses, genres and narrative strategies unfolding in these texts. The paper suggests the idea that such structural “cracks” and contradictions mark the departure from the boundaries and limits of contemporary patriarchal discourses and the dominant literary system.