| Sumario: | Finn Job's Damenschach (2024) offers a reworking of Twelfth Night in a contemporary setting, thereby exploring the vitality of a work of traditional canonic culture in the current context of skepticism toward tradition. It transforms Shakespeare's comedy of cross‐dressing into an inquiry into identity politics and gender fluidity which takes shape via a formal shuttling among alternative theater‐historical genres: comedy, Kammerspiel, commedia dell'arte, and tragedy. The intratextual generic indeterminacy stages a broader challenge to rigid concepts of identity that is subject to questioning by the characters themselves. Furthermore, popular musical interludes offer alternative diagnoses, as do the narrative's antithetical conclusions: harmonious reconciliation versus violent sacrifice in a Girardian paradigm. This novel by an emerging author offers a variegated description of the cultural moment, drawing on a pessimistic undertone in the Shakespearean original but also sketching emancipatory prospects beyond identitarian constraints.
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