Gyp as 'agent provocateur' in an epoch of upheaval: an author between female liberalism and anti-Semitism (in the sign of an (anti-)modernity)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Kirsten von Hagen
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516657454

As the author of around 100 novels and 30 plays, as a pamphleteer, political commentator and caricaturist, Sybille-Gabrielle Marie-Antoinette de Riquetti de Mirabeau, Comtesse Martel de Janville (1849-1932) was, under the pseudonym Gyp, one of the most respected writers and publicists in Belle Époque Paris. In the course of the "scandal of the century" of the Dreyfus Affair, the self-confessed anti-Semite advanced to become a media-produced reporter and spokesperson for the anti-Dreyfusards. The project systematically examines for the first time the multi-dimensional oeuvre of the author, who has hitherto gone unnoticed by researchers, with regard to her significance as a writer in a special situation of upheaval at the turn of the century, who played a central role as an "agent provocateur" not only in the literary but also in the socio-cultural field. The study, which is oriented towards cultural studies and comparative literature, focuses on her function for an emerging literary modernity - especially under the sign of an aesthetic of the spectacular, in the context of contemporary gender discourses and concepts of the body and under intermedial aspects, and on her critical role as a central agent of a medially instrumentalized anti-Semitism at the intersection of literary and political interests, where also the figure of the "intellectual" was articulated in the course of the Dreyfus Affair. Within this field of tension, Gyp's multimodal work is seen as the crystallisation point of a literature that, as a "critique" of time and a production of "knowledge", reflects the particular situation between awakening and decadence.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants