Lynne Tatlock

Lynne Tatlock

Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities
PhD, Indiana University
research interests:
  • German Literature
  • Book History
  • Gender Studies and Women’s Writing
  • History of the Novel
  • Literature and Medicine
  • Literature and Society
  • Nationalism
  • Reading Cultures
  • Regionalism
  • Translation and Cultural Mediation

contact info:

mailing address:

  • Washington University

    CB 1104

    One Brookings Drive

    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

​Professor Tatlock has published widely on German literature and culture from 1650 to the 1990s with a particular focus on the late seventeenth century and the nineteenth century.

Tatlock has maintained an abiding interest in the novel and its origins, the construction and representation of gender, reading communities and reading habits, nineteenth-century regionalism and nationalism, and the intersection between fiction and other social and cultural discourses. Some of her recent publications include books, edited and co-edited volumes, translations, and articles on the seventeenth-century poet Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, the American translator of E. Marlitt, nineteenth-century American reading of German women’s writing, Gustav Freytag's alternative address to national community, Gabriele Reuter as contributor to the New York Times, new approaches to book history and literary history, reception and the gendering of German culture, and cultural transfer.

She has undertaken literary translations of two novels by women, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Their Pavel (Das Gemeindekind) and Gabriele Reuter’s From a Good Family; selections from Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg's meditations on the incarnation, passion, and death of Jesus Christ; and Justine Siegemund’s seventeenth-century midwife’s handbook. Her activity as literary translator has fueled her scholarly work on cultural mediation, reception, and the international book trade.

Her teaching at present centers on questions of regionalism and nationalism and reader communities, nationalism and French-German relations, the construction and representation of community, nineteenth and early twentieth-century women writers, bourgeois literature and reading habits, literary genres and violence, and book history.

Selected Publications

German Literature as a Transnational Field of Production, 148-1919. Ed. Lynne Tatlock and Kurt Beals. Rochester, NY Camden House, 2023.

Jane Eyre in German Lands: The Import of Romance, 1848-1918 New Directions in German Studies 34 (New York Bloomsbury Press, 2022).

German Writing/ American Reading: Women and the Import of Fiction, 1866-1917. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2012.

“How to Be a German Woman: Mixed Messages at the Columbian Exposition,” in Global Voices from the Women’s Library at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Feminisms, Transnationalism and the Archive, edited by Marija Dalbello and Sarah Wadsworth (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2023), 115-34.

“Making Sense of Snippets: Thekla von Gumpert’s Album for Girls, ca. 1871-1914,” in Miszellanes Lesen. Interferenzen zwischen medialen Formaten, Romanstrukturen und Lektürepraktiken im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Daniela Gretz, Marcus Krause, and Nicolas Pethes, Journalliteratur 5 (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2022), 315-42.