This book is the first to compare three contemporary women writing in German: Herta M--uuml--;ller (from Romania), Libuse Mon--iacute--;kov--aacute--; (from Czechoslovakia), and Kerstin Hensel (from the GDR). Drawing on psychoanlytical, feminist, and performativity theory, it looks at images of the body and their relationship to the structures of their writing as well as analysing the social, cultural, and political contexts. - ;This book examines the relationship between representations of the body and narrative strategies in the work of three contemporary women writers from the former Easter