The writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé fascinates because of her associations with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud and because she was active in the cultural and intellectual life of late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria. This study analyzes how Andreas-Salomé depicted women in her fictional works just as feminism was emerging, revealing a complex engagement with questions of narrative and identity. More than mere thematic explorations of women's changing roles in society, her works investigate the concept of identity and its relationship to gender, sexuality, and narrative representation. She is as concerned with a cultural crisis of femininity and masculinity as with the identity crises of her individual women characters.
Organised around each decade of the post war period, this book analyses novels written by and for women from 1945 to the present. Each chapter identifies a specific genre in popular fiction for women which marked that period and provides case studies focusing on writers and texts which enjoyed a wide readership.