Milostná vášeň v dílech osvícenských spisovatelek z českých zemí
The Passion of Love in the Works of Enlightenment Women Writers from the Czech Lands

Summary/Abstract: The study examines the depiction of love in texts by women authors of the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries. It traces the tensions created by the assertion of the “romantic” image of love as love in relation to a society supposedly autonomous, unconditional and spontaneous and the needs of a transforming bourgeois family. It then traces the various articulations and resolutions of this conflict in the works of Marie Anna Sager (née Rozkošny), Victoria Rupp (née Roudnitz), Walburga Truchsess-Zeyl, Rebecca Leška, Emilie Nunn, and (in translation) Babeta Bradáčová. It concludes that the texts neither reduce the role of women in these conflicts to pragmatic self-sacrifice for the sake of economic and socially acceptable pragmatics, nor do they explicitly adorn the “impossibility” of romantic love, as encountered, for example, in the male authors of the “Sturm und Drang” movement, but rather seek and find a compromise solution between the interests of the nuclear family on the one hand and the need for the objectification and unconditionality of love on the other. Sager achieves this through the seamless transition of sibling love into lover love, Rupp through the emotional manipulation of a daughter in love by her mother, Truchsess-Zeyl through the re-introduction of spouses who think of themselves as strangers, and the text mediated by Bradáčová through the strengthening of the mother-son relationship as a substitute for a lost lover

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