Margaret McCarthy – författare

The last two decades have been transformational, often discordant ones for German feminism, as a new cohort of activists has come of age and challenged many of the movement’s strategic and philosophical orthodoxies. Mad Mädchen offers an incisive analysis of these trans-generational debates, identifying the mother-daughter themes and other tropes that have defined their representation in German literature, film, and media. Author Margaret McCarthy investigates female subjectivity as it processes political discourse to define itself through both differences and affinities among women. Ultimately, such a model suggests new ways of re-imagining feminist solidarity across generational, ethnic, and racial lines.

Pop literature of the 1990s enjoyed bestselling success, as well as an extensive and sometimes bluntly derogatory reception in the press. Since then, less censorious scholarship on pop has emerged to challenge its flash-in-the-pan status by situating the genre within a longer history of aesthetic practices. This volume draws on recent work and its attempts to define the genre, locate historical antecedents and assess pop’s ability to challenge the status quo. Significantly, it questions the ‘official story’ of pop literature by looking beyond Ralf Dieter Brinkmann’s works as origin to those of Jürgen Ploog, Jörg Fauser and Hadayatullah Hübsch. It also remedies the lack of attention to questions of gender in previous pop lit scholarship and demonstrates how the genre has evolved in the new millennium via expanded thematic concerns and new aesthetic approaches. Essays in the volume examine the writing of well-known, established pop authors – such as Christian Kracht, Andreas Neumeister, Joachim Lottman, Benjamin Lebert, Florian Illies, Feridun Zaimoğlu and Sven Regener – as well as more recent works by Jana Hensel, Charlotte Roche, Kerstin Grether, Helene Hegemann and songwriter/poet PeterLicht.