Full Description
In 1930 Danish artist Einar Wegener underwent a series of surgeries to live as Lili Ilse Elvenes (more commonly known as Lili Elbe). Her life story, Fra Mand til Kvinde (From Man to Woman), published in Copenhagen in 1931, is the first popular full-length (auto)biographical narrative of a subject who undergoes genital transformation surgery (Genitalumwandlung).
In Man Into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition, Pamela L. Caughie and Sabine Meyer present the full text of the 1933 American edition of Elbe's work with comprehensive notes on textual and paratextual variants across the four published editions in three languages. This edition also includes a substantial scholarly introduction which situates the historical and intellectual context of Elbe's work, as well as new essays on the work by leading scholars in transgender studies and modernist literature, and critical coverage of the 2015 biopic, The Danish Girl.
This print edition has a digital companion: the Lili Elbe Digital Archive (www.lilielbe.org). Launched on July 6, 2019, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) where Lili Elbe was initially examined, the Lili Elbe Digital Archive hosts the German typescript and all four editions of this narrative published in Danish, German, and English between 1931 and 1933, with English translations of the Danish edition and the typescript. Many letters from archives and contemporaneous articles noted in this print edition may be found in the digital archive.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Archival sources
Note on the Edition
Chronology
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part I: A Short Life of Lili Elbe
Part II:A Short History of Sexology
Part III: Man into Woman and Modernist Life Writing
Part IV: Compositional and Publication History
Part V: Contributors' Essays
Corpus:
Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Sex Change
Textual Notes
New Essays on Man into Woman:
Madelyn Detloff, "The Binary Bind: Inversion, Intersexuality and Interest in a Very
Queer Künstlerroman"
Sølve M. Holm, "Current and Historical Notions of Sexed Embodiment and
Transition in Relation to Lili Elvenes"
Michael Levenson, "Man into Woman: A Modernist Experimental Genre"
Tim Armstrong, "Magic and Medicine: Man into Woman and Anthropology"
Tobias Raun, "Getting the Lili We Deserve? Telling a Different Story of Lili Elbe
through the Portraits of Gerda Wegener"
Eliza Steinbock, "A Pretty Knot of Lilies: Disentangling Lili Elbe's longue durée in Pop
Culture"
Contributors
Bibliography
Index
