Sarah Frühwirth
Mourning and Gender.
English-literature scholar Sarah Frühwirth researches discourses of mourning and gender in the 18th century.
Does mourning have a gender? How did the free will debate affect 19th-century literature? Sensation novels, literary representations of mourning, the history of science and medicine, determinism and free will, and gender studies are the research interests of literary scholar Sarah Frühwirth. She has been a PostDoc at the Department of English Studies since May 2023.
Discourses of Mourning and Gender in the 18th Century
Mourning and death are almost taboo subjects today, but in the 18th century genres that sublimated mourning and grief experienced a heyday. Graveyard poetry, mourning diaries, and fictional epitaphs bear witness to the intense interest in this subject. Sarah Frühwirth's current research is devoted to the representation of mourning in 18th-century literature and culture and their connection with contemporary gender discourses. Is it always a woman who breaks down crying at the grave, or do men also give expression to their grief, and how do literary and cultural representations differ here? How gender norms and stereotypes were inscribed in the representations of mourning of this time and shifted as a result of them is now the central aspect of Frühwirth's next research project.
However, her fascination with English literature and interest in gender issues already began as a high school student. Lady Audley's Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon remains her favourite novel. According to Frühwirth, Braddon created a female character who breaks with the idealised image of the Victorian woman and thereby challenges common gender stereotypes of the 19th century with the titular protagonist, Lady Audley.
Sensation novels and merchandising
The so-called sensation novels also play an important role in the literary scholar's work to date. This is a genre that was very briefly very relevant in the 19th century and from which later developed the still popular detective fiction. Sensation novels experienced a heyday in the 1860s and 1870s, fuelled by the publication of Wilkie Collins's novel The Woman in White (1859). It was one of the best-selling novels of the 19th century – despite receiving little critical acclaim – and a marketing sensation. Not only were bets placed on what would happen next in the novel (note that at that time novels were usually published in instalments), one could even buy the accompanying The Woman in White perfume. For a long time, however, literature of this kind was not a subject of literary research. It is only in recent years that sensation novels have increasingly become part of the discourse. To which Frühwirth's dissertation "Discourses of Determinism in British Sensation Novels of the 1860s and 1870s" is not least to be counted. She was also Reviews Editor of the Wilkie Collins Journal from 2018 to 2022 and joined the editorial team of the Journal of Victorian Culture in 2022.
Sarah Frühwirth studied English and American Studies as well as German Philology in Vienna, where she also completed her PhD in English Studies in 2020. After working as a PraeDoc and as a lecturer at the University of Vienna, she joined the Department of English Studies in May as a PostDoc in the research area "English Drama from the Early Modern Period to the Present" with Professor Christine Schwanecke.