In the wake of the French Revolution history was no longer imagined as a cyclical process in which the succession of ruling dynasties was as predictable as the change in the seasons. Contemporaries wrestled with the meaning of this historical rupture which represented both the progress of the Enlightenment and the darkness of the Terreur. French authors discussed the political events in their country but they were not the only ones to do so. As the effects of the French Revolution became more palpable across the border German authors pondered their implications in newspapers political pamphlets and historiographical treatises. German women also participated in these debates but they often embedded their political commentary in literary texts because they were discouraged and sometimes even barred from publishing in explicitly political and public venues. As such literature in the sense of belles lettres had a compensatory function for women it allowed them to engage in political discussion without explicitly encroaching on certain domains that were perceived as a male preserve. As women writers explored the uses of literature for political commentary they adapted major literary genres in order to consolidate their position in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury literary sphere. Those genres included domestic fiction the historical novel historical tragedy autobiography the Robinsonade and the Bildungsroman. Women writers challenged the images of women traditionally portrayed in these genres dutiful daughter submissive wife caring mother tantalizing mistress angelic figure and passive victim. Gender and Genre discusses six women writers who replaced these traditional female types with women warriors and emigrants as protagonists in texts published between 1795 and 1821 Therese Huber Caroline de la Motte Fouque Christine Westphalen Regula Engel Sophie von La Roche and Henriette Froelich. These authors protagonists question traditional images of passive fem