Die Imagination des Weiblichen

This book is intended to be a social and historical description of how male writers portrait female characters in their prose works during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century in the Austrian literature. Core writer for this comparative analysis is Arthur Schnitzler and his short story "Frauelein Else" (1924) in which the Viennese author shows clearly his male imaginative perspective in describing Else as a projection of his male wishes. This male literary description of womanhood does not correspond to the historically dimension of the woman in the Austrian society of Schnitzler's time.