META: Margareta Klopstock’s Aesthetic Feminism

In 2028, we would grandly celebrate the three hundredth birthday of Margareta Klopstock (1728–1758), née Moller, often known as “Meta,” if she were ultimately recognized for what she truly is: one of the most popular and influential public intellectuals of the mid-eighteenth century. She corresponded with well-known European contemporaries, was the author of literary texts, and collaborated with her renowned husband, the German author Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock.

Female authors, however, are significantly underrepresented in the canon of the European Enlightenment. In the public sphere of evolving bourgeois society, the position of the female was ideologically appropriated in both social life and art and literature, which are populated by new virtuous heroines who embody the moral values of the rising economic class. Nevertheless, this period also witnessed the emergence of a bourgeois feminism forty years before Olympe de Gouges produced the “Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne” in 1791.

The thesis of the project is that M. Klopstock’s bourgeois feminism is an aesthetic feminism. This feminism arises from social practices of women’s everyday life (family, friendship, love, marriage, fashion, secretarial work, etc.) which shape new aesthetic forms in her letters and literary texts. These aesthetic forms manifest themselves on the levels of materiality, genre poetics, and metafiction. By analyzing her epistolary and literary oeuvre on the methodological basis of a literary-sociological approach, the research project will yield a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary research on “female” or even “feminist Enlightenment.”

M. Klopstock’s legacy was secured, but also manipulated, by her husband, who overpowered her feminist voice in “Hinterlaßne Schriften von Margareta Klopstock,” which he published in 1759. Although the Klopstocks are a famous couple in the 1750s, it is essential to establish M. Klopstock’s unique position within the literary network as distinct from that of her husband. This long-overdue revision is not simply about highlighting another female author—it is about acknowledging that M. Klopstock not only plays a pivotal role in the emergence of bourgeois feminism but is also integral to the development of modern European literature. Her aesthetic feminism thus merits thorough, in-depth exploration.

The project aims to determine M. Klopstock’s position in the literary network of the mid-eighteenth century and her contribution to the emerging bourgeois feminism by pursuing two overarching research goals that make the relevance of the project clear. First, it is about adding a female author of potential world fame to the history of European Enlightenment. Second, on this historical basis, it will show that M. Klopstock’s role was neither that of companion or muse to her famous husband nor that of a master of the “language of the heart and nature.” In her epistolary and literary oeuvre, she enriches the spectrum of bourgeois feminism with a genuinely aesthetic feminism.

Project leader: Frauke Berndt

Postdoc: Céline Martins-Thomas

Doc: N.N.

Research assistant: Alina Falch

Start: 1 January 2026