Heffernan, Valerie (2011) Julia Franck, Die Mittagsfrau: Historia Matria and Matrilineal Narrative. In: Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century. Camden House, pp. 148-161. ISBN 978-1-57113-421-9

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Abstract

When Julia Franck was awarded the German Book Prize in 2007, she was by no means a newcomer to the literary scene. The author had already published three novels and two collections of short stories before her epic tome Die Mittagsfrau (literally, Lady Midday, the noonday witch, 2007; published in English as The Blind Side of the Heart, 2009) earned her Germany’s most prestigious literary award. In selecting Franck’s novel, the jury members were unanimous in their praise of its “vivid use of language, narrative power and psychological intensity,” calling it “a novel for long conversations.” Franck’s powerful depiction of a woman who, against the backdrop of war-torn Germany, comes to the momentous decision to abandon her seven-year-old son at a railway station certainly provides plenty of material for discussion.

Item Type:	Book Section
Keywords:	Julia Franck; Die Mittagsfrau; Historia Matria; Matrilineal Narrative;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures > German
Item ID:	4275
Depositing User:	Valerie Heffernan
Date Deposited:	25 Mar 2013 14:51
Publisher:	Camden House
Refereed:	Yes
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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