Project Details
Sidonia Hedwig Zäunemann in the literary-scholarly discourse of the 1730s
Applicant
Dr. Corinna Dziudzia
Subject Area
German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550387211
The proposed project aims to examine the author Sidonia Hedwig Zäunemann (1711-1740) as part of the literary-scholarly discourse of her time, to show her as a learned woman in exchange with others and as a contributor to various publication formats. In particular, the planned monograph will evaluate and incorporate further archive holdings that are unknown and unexplored by researchers so far. These holdings were identified during the preparatory work. Such a study is a gap; it aims to provide a comprehensive account of her many years of publishing activity, to examine the contemporary reception of her writings, and to reveal her literary-scholarly network of relationships, both in the personal sphere and in terms of literary role models. The work program is divided into three segments: the work with the archive holdings, the literature, and the manuscript. Fundamental to the proposed project is the examination and analysis of existing sources that still need to be considered. So far, it has been possible to identify an early poem by the poet, who was just 17 years old at the time. Such sources, hitherto unknown to research, shed light on a much longer and more extensive poetic activity than previously known. At the same time, they provide information on the contexts and conditions in which the writing activity was created. So far, Zäunemann has been treated primarily from the perspective of early proto-feminism, what obscures the fact that the women of her hometown were not under male guardianship and comparatively well-educated. The project aims to shed light on hitherto unknown aspects, to portray the real life and activities of a female author of the early ‘Enlightenment‘ who was interested in the literary-musical field as well as in the scientific-technical, making Zäunemann a potentially revealing case study. It is to be shown that she was involved in the literary and scholarly discourse of her time and that her texts can be found in a variety of contexts: Her verses can be detected in albums, scholarly journals, and works regarding famous personalities of the time; they deal with mining as well as flourishing banana plants, academic and military events. However, their contemporary reception has yet to be determined: (female) poets dedicating poems to her as she was known cross-regional by the time she was crowned by the University of Göttingen. Yet, her connection to radical Enlightenment circles, which can be reconstructed through her brother-in-law, is entirely unknown and untold, as is his role in general. Finally, it is essential to address why Zäunemann cannot be called ‘forgotten‘ but is not known to a broader public.
DFG Programme
Research Grants