"Susanne Kord offers a critical re-examination of the traditional image of this most pivotal of all female Enlightenment authors. Central to Kord's discussion are Gottsched's dramas and her letters to Johann Christoph Gottsched, her husband and mentor, and to Dorothea Henriette von Runckel, her friend and confidante. Both the letters, edited and censored by Runckel, and the plays, commissioned and edited by her husband, reveal a number of intriguing "detours" from the path of conventionality: biographical aberrations in her letters (her chagrined loyalty to her husband, her passionate "friendship" with Runckel) and poetological deviations from her husband's poetics expressed in her dramas."--BOOK JACKET.