Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Comedy, the Sentimental Marriage, and Modes of Resistance
- 1 Promoting the Sentimental Marriage in Theory and in Practice
- 2 The Virgin Huntress Tamed: J. C. Gottsched's Atalanta and the Erasure of Female Autonomy
- 3 Marriage Brokering at the Expense of Economics: C. F. Gellert's Die zärtlichen Schwestern
- 4 The Clothes Make the Man: J. E. Schlegel's Der Triumph der guten Frauen
- 5 Cross-Dressing and Gender Performance in G. E. Lessing's Der Misogyne
- 6 Sickness Masks Desire in Th. J. Quistorp's Der Hypochondrist
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - Marriage Brokering at the Expense of Economics: C. F. Gellert's Die zärtlichen Schwestern
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Comedy, the Sentimental Marriage, and Modes of Resistance
- 1 Promoting the Sentimental Marriage in Theory and in Practice
- 2 The Virgin Huntress Tamed: J. C. Gottsched's Atalanta and the Erasure of Female Autonomy
- 3 Marriage Brokering at the Expense of Economics: C. F. Gellert's Die zärtlichen Schwestern
- 4 The Clothes Make the Man: J. E. Schlegel's Der Triumph der guten Frauen
- 5 Cross-Dressing and Gender Performance in G. E. Lessing's Der Misogyne
- 6 Sickness Masks Desire in Th. J. Quistorp's Der Hypochondrist
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–69) exerted a tremendous influence on his contemporaries throughout eighteenth-century Europe, reaching into many levels of society, and at his death, Leipzig authorities had to declare his grave off-limits to visitors, as the sheer number of his mourners had begun to take a toll on the cemetery and Gellert's enthusiastic fans had taken to filling reliquaries with earth from his grave site. Gellert's sentimental comedy Die zärtlichen Schwestern (The tender sisters, 1747) was influential as well. The play was published in five editions throughout the eighteenth century, translated into four European languages, and performed many times on the stage after its premiere, which was put on by the Neuber troupe. The play was well received by contemporaries such as Christian Heinrich Schmid and Johann Georg Hamann.
Gellert, like Gottsched, was profoundly interested in morality. He earned his reputation as a writer of fables, a genre devoted to the moral education of its audience, and he published a series of lectures on morality, including moralische Charaktere, or moral vignettes, which he had given as a professor at the University of Leipzig. Gellert, like Gottsched, traces immorality to the individual's lack of success in controlling his or her passions and to the way in which the passions cloud reason, the faculty that enables one to make the correct moral choices. One of the most prominent and most dangerous of the passions, according to Gellert, is sexual desire.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012