Frauke Berndt (University of Zurich) will spend the month of July 2024 at echo as a Visiting Fellow. She will pursue a project on Margareta Klopstock’s epistolary and literary work.

The project, entitled „Voices of Sensibility (META)“, aims to determine the position of Margareta Klopstock, née Moller (1728-1758), in the literary network of the eighteenth century for the first time. The corpus of her texts comprises correspondence with important contemporaries such as Johann Jakob Bodmer, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Johann Adolf Schlegel, Christoph Martin Wieland, even Samuel Richardson, but above all with her fiancé and husband since 1754, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, which was already edited in the 1960s. The letters are characterised by a particularly 'natural' voice of their writer, who also possessed the educated 'wit' of the Rococo period. The rhetoric of such a 'language of the heart', for which these letters, among others, serve as a model, has long been at the centre of research into European discourse formation between 1740 and 1760. But when M. Klopstock raises her voice and takes the floor, she does not figure in her hitherto largely ignored literary texts as a passive, feminine, emotional echo of an active, masculine, rational voice of reason, but finds her own voice as an author.