This article is based on findings of studies on the history of family and parenthood, as well as on suggestions from Gender Studies and the New Men's Studies, that came to propose a new image of the masculine, marked by factors such as complexity, historicity and the idea of masculinity as a construct. Equally productive for the analyses undertaken are categories such as performance and masquerade, popularized by the performative turn in the 90s. It will focus on the Father/daughter-relationship in three canonical texts of German literature, belonging to the period of development of bourgeois society, which is most closely liked with a model of patriarchal fatherhood (the bourgeois tragedy Emilia Galotti by G. E. Lessing, the tale Rat Krespel by E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the novel Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane).This article is based on findings of studies on the history of family and parenthood, as well as on suggestions from Gender Studies and the New Men's Studies, that came to propose a new image of the masculine, marked by factors such as complexity, historicity and the idea of masculinity as a construct. Equally productive for the analyses undertaken are categories such as performance and masquerade, popularized by the performative turn in the 90s. It will focus on the Father/daughter-relationship in three canonical texts of German literature, belonging to the period of development of bourgeois society, which is most closely liked with a model of patriarchal fatherhood (the bourgeois tragedy Emilia Galotti by G. E. Lessing, the tale Rat Krespel by E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the novel Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane)
