Abstract: This article offers a gender-conscious reading of Joseph von Eichendorff's famous ballad “Waldgespräch” by highlighting the emancipatory elements embedded in the author's changes to Clemens Brentano’s original tale of Lore Lay. When read “against the grain,” the conversation in the ballad can be viewed as transcribing two opposing discourses: one that encodes hegemonic masculinity by means of a “rational” dualist worldview, and another that disrupts said dominant logic by “conjuring up” an alternative subjectivity to resist patriarchal logocentrism. Furthermore, the article proposes, Eichendorff's Lorelay embodies patriarchy's suppressed Other, meaning that the hunter's supposed death in the forest signifies a victory of the Other.

Keywords: Eichendorff, Waldgespräch, Lorelei, Lorelay, ballad, gender, discourse analysis, patriarchy, feminism

JOSEPH VON EICHENDORFF's first novel Ahnung und Gegenwart (“Premonition and Present Times,” 1815) has been read as the depiction of its two protagonists’ sometimes conjoined, sometimes separate journeys to “genuine” Romanticism, with Leontin embracing natural poetry and Friedrich eventually entering a Catholic monastery. On the way, Leontin finds salvation in Julie, his selfless muse from the countryside, while Friedrich encounters many obstacles, most notably women by whom he is briefly fascinated, such as the seductive Romana or shallow Rosa, before he accepts religion as his redemption. Along with the other women portrayed in the novel, such as the sickly girl-in-disguise Erwine or the sensual Marie, the female figures thus seem to serve as mere stepping-stones in the formation of the male protagonists’ characters and life purposes. There is, however, one significant departure from this imbalanced portrayal of men and women in the male-centric Ahnung und Gegenwart. In the fifteenth chapter of the third book, readers encounter the most famous lyrical interlude of the novel, the balladic poem that attained a life outside of Eichendorff's Bildungsroman when it was later published independently in an 1837 collection of his poems under the title “Waldgespräch” (Conversation in the Forest).

This article offers a gender-conscious reading of Eichendorff's ballad by rejecting its claims of masculinist universality and excavating the female speaker's perspective in its dialogue. To do so, I examine the poem as transcribing two discourses. The first one, articulated by the hunter, encodes hegemonic masculinity by means of a rational, dualist worldview that by default must include both a gendered superiority and its opposite.

There are increasing efforts aiming to utilise endophytes as biological control agents (BCAs) to improve crop production. However, reliability remains a major practical constraint for the development of novel BCAs. Many organisms are adapted to their specific habitat; it is optimistic to expect that a new organism added can find a niche or even out-compete those adapted and already present. Our approach for isolating novel BCAs for specific plant diseases is therefore to look in healthy plants in a habitat where disease is a problem, since we predict that it is more likely to find competitive strains among those present and adapted. In vitro inhibitory activities often do not correlate with in planta efficacy, especially since endophytes rely on intimate plant contact. They can, however, be useful to indicate modes of action. We therefore screen for in planta biological activity as early as possible in the process in order to minimise the risk of discarding valuable strains. Finally, some fungi are endophytic in one situation and pathogenic in another (the mutualism–parasitism continuum). This depends on their biology, environmental conditions, the formulation of inoculum, the health, developmental stage and cultivar of the host plant, and the structure of the plant microbiome.

Barley is an important crop worldwide with production largely used for animal feed and alcoholic beverages. Diseases are a major limiting factor to its production. These have, up until recently, been controlled by agrochemicals. However, legislation on the use of agrochemicals, especially within the European Union, is being tightened and there is growing interest in integrated pest management. This means that there is an increasing focus on controlling diseases using biological control. Living microorganisms that are applied as biological control agents (BCAs) to either soil, seed or leaves can have difficulty in persisting. Therefore, the focus of this review is on endophytes, which are microorganisms that live inside the plant without causing symptoms of disease and have the potential of staying protected as well as being beneficial to the plant and effective against multiple diseases. In this review, we discuss the different approaches for finding and testing beneficial endophytes and for determining the endophyte host range. Furthermore, we undertook a literature search to summarise previous studies that have investigated the use of endophytes as well as BCAs against barley diseases.

In the course of the 1990s, the welfare states of modern western societies were confronted with new and changing challenges that were, in part, contradictory. These challenges were caused by exogenous processes, including globalisation and EU integration, as well as endogenous processes involving social and economical change within European societies (Esping-Andersen, 1999, Esping-Andersen et al, 2002). As a consequence of such processes, social security systems came under pressure (Ferrera and Rhodes, 2000; Scharpf and Schmidt, 2000; Hinrichs, 2001). At the same time, new demands pertaining to social security developed as a result of changes in the life histories of individuals (Naegele et al, 2003; Guillemard, Chapter Four, this volume). Processes such as increasing rates of unemployment in the 1990s, increasing labour-force participation of women, increasing migration to EU member states, demographic developments (particularly an increase in the proportion of older people) and the proliferation of unstable forms of employment, together with the related prospect of insecure income, have contributed to these changes (Lind and Møller, 1999). At the same time, new discourses concerning the legitimacy of welfare state spending have emerged at the cultural level. These have often been based on neoliberal and communitarian thinking and have led to the active alignment of welfare states towards the market, resulting in part in the questioning of the state's role in redistribution.

As a consequence of the processes by which welfare states have attempted to find solutions to these new challenges, many European welfare states were restructured in the 1990s and at the beginning of the new millennium. The nature of these changes is a contested issue among social-policy researchers. Some argue that European welfare states are converging towards a neoliberal type of welfare regime in which the welfare state assumes a more marginal role in relation to the market (Gilbert, 2002). Alan Walker (Chapter Three) argues that neoliberal economic globalisation has led to a transformation of European welfare systems along at least two dimensions: firstly, in deregulation, privatisation and marketisation and secondly, in the shift from social justice to economic investment (the productive role of welfare) in the guidance of social policy. Other things being equal, these new developments may increase the risk of poverty and social exclusion.

This book is an outcome of COST Action A13, ‘Changing Labour Markets, Welfare Policies and Citizenship’.The purpose of COST Action A13 has been to examine the effects of social security systems and welfare institutions on the processes of political and social marginalisation and exclusion. So far, COST Action A13 has published or is in the process of publishing the following books and articles in journals:

Jørgen Goul Andersen and Per H. Jensen (eds) Changing labour markets, welfare policies and citizenship, Bristol: The Policy Press.

Jørgen Goul Andersen, Jochen Clasen, Wim van Oorschot and Knut Halvorsen (eds) Europe's new state of welfare: Unemployment, employment policies and citizenship, Bristol: The Policy Press.

Tony Maltby, Bert de Vroom, Maria Luisa Mirabile and Einar Øverbye (eds) Ageing and the transition to retirement, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Jean-Claude Barbier and Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer (eds) ‘The many worlds of activation’, European Societies, vol 6, no 4, Special issue on activation policies.

Harriet Bradley and Jacques van Hoof (eds) Young people in Europe: Labour markets and citizenship, Bristol: The Policy Press.

Birgit Pfau-Effinger and Birgit Geissler (eds) Care and social integration in European societies, Bristol: The Policy Press.

COST is an intergovernmental organisation for the coordination of scientific and technical research, aiming at the coordination and formation of networks on a European level between nationally funded research projects. Some 80 experts, appointed by 17 countries, have participated in COST Action A13. The COST Action A13 network was in force for five years (1998-2003). For further information about COST Action A13, see www.socsci.aau.dk/cost.