This session will consider the role of women playwrights in western theater since the French Revolution. Areas to explore might include

• the outlines of a tradition inaugurated by the French playwright and revolutionary Olympe de Gouges
• women playwrights and the boundaries between popular and elite culture
• suffragist playwrights and the invention of new political roles for women
• women playwrights and the "father" of modern drama
• the carnivalesque in plays by women
• performance and everyday life
• genders and lifestyles in the 1890s
• plays by women of the 1980s and the 1990s

250 word abstracts by September 20 to Lynn Wilkinson, Dept. of Germanic Studies, University of Texas, Austin TX 78712; or by email: LRW@mail.utexas.edu