Bücher der Reihe North American Studies in Nineteenth-century German Literature and Culture

During the mid-nineteenth century, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer pursued a fifty-year career as a playwright and theater manager in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at a time of the transformation of court theaters and itinerant troupes into commercial establishments staffed by middle-class professionals and subject to market forces. Although she has been undervalued by some critics past and present who considered her mainly as an adapter of contemporary novels, this study shows that with her thorough knowledge of the European dramatic tradition, her skill as a playwright, and above all her professionalism she overcame institutional and gender bias to develop a form of drama that integrated the social and economic changes of her time. The analysis focuses on her use of the subversive genre of comedy, the strategies she used to evade the censor, and her employment of assertive female and working-class characters. She revived commedia dell¿arte techniques of the past while devising innovations that anticipated the subsequent course of drama as well as the film techniques of today.

As one of the most widely read German authors of the nineteenth century, Gustav Freytag (1816-1895) continues to be associated with the middle class and the progress it enjoyed. Yet while his best-selling novel Soll und Haben (1855) and its lesser-known successor Die verlorene Handschrift (1864) owed their vast commercial success largely to their buoyant message of bourgeois advancement, they simultaneously devote significant attention to elements of traditional German society. In exploring Freytag¿s dual roles as both a novelist of contemporary middle-class life and a cultural historian, this book uncovers the author¿s divergent ¿ and ostensibly conflicting ¿ desire both to embrace progress and commemorate the past. Investigating his literary engagement with three central elements of Germany¿s historical identity ¿ the pervasiveness of folk beliefs, a strong identification with rural life, and the continued presence of the aristocracy ¿ this study shows how Freytag attempts to locate these constituents of pre-industrial Germany in a modern, industrial nation, and in doing so contributes to a historically anchored national identity in which material and political progress coexist with a rich heritage and ancient traditions.

Much as Nietzsche has gained in popularity during the last century, his poetry still has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. On closer scrutiny, his aposiopetic style, along with the labyrinthine and self-referential nature of his writings, subtly hint toward the recurring and parallel presence of poetry in his writings. This fact cannot be ignored, and his poetry should therefore be included in any reading of Nietzsche. This study investigates Nietzsche¿s poetic output while simultaneously regarding him as a poet-philosopher. This reading allows juxtaposing all Nietzschean key concepts while avoiding the temptation to simplify Nietzsche by centering his thought on any particular one. The author ends by highlighting a hitherto neglected term that allows a simultaneous reading of Nietzschean keywords while also including the essential notions of movement, flux, and play.

This book offers a new understanding of the nineteenth-century German author Theodor Storm, taking seriously, for the first time, the heritage of the Danish muse in his life and major works. Bernd offers a Dano-German portrait of Storm, tracing the youth of the author in the bicultural borderland of Schleswig, where Storm lived under a succession of Danish monarchs until he was 36 years old, and learned to refer to the German states as Ausland (foreign territory). Highlighting the German nationalism that has prevented previous biographers, beginning with Storm¿s own daughter, from drawing attention to the importance of Danish culture and literature in forming the author, Bernd then details Storm¿s education and reading in the Danish language and literature, showing how he added a distinct Danish tone to his German poetry and also refashioned the German novella in the manner of Danish practitioners, and thus became a unique representative of a Danish literature situated in the German-speaking world. These achievements, inflected by transnational influence, should now help us to recognize Storm as a figure of exceptional importance in European letters.

Despite its popularity during the nineteenth century, regional literature has often been overlooked with regard to its role in the development of German national consciousness. By exploring various illustrations of geographic-historical landscapes in texts written before the 1848 revolutions and after the 1871 unification, this book investigates the vital polyphony generated by unique regional voices throughout the age of nationalism. Close readings of texts by Berthold Auerbach, Theodor Storm, Wilhelm Raabe, Fritz Reuter, Theodor Fontane, Gottfried Keller, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach examine recognizable and unfamiliar regions. Although this study concentrates on provincial writings, literary regionalism¿s fictionality and simultaneous referentiality raise broader questions for the programmatic aesthetics of Poetic Realism and for inquiries into identity formation.

This monograph details Gutzkow¿s recurring use of performance-within-the-play as a means of encouraging an active, political response by the audience. He incorporates an internal audience viewing a performance on stage in order to model an ideal of dramatic reception for the audiences of his own play. Gutzkow structures the narrative contextualization of these performances as reflections of specific issues in the German states of the Vormärz. Beginning with an overview of theoretical and literary texts from the 1830s, this study traces Gutzkow¿s transferral of self-reflexive structures from his novels of this decade into his first staged play, Richard Savage (1839), and on through Das Urbild des Tartüffe (1844) and Uriel Acosta (1845). It concludes by portraying Der Königsleutnant (1849) as a transitional work that shows Gutzkow¿s decision to return to the novel as a consequence of the failure of his plays to attain the reception he intended. By using the coherency of the communicated message instead of fealty to aesthetic norms as the evaluative criteria for discussing Gutzkow¿s plays, the book exposes an innovative mode of specifically literary social criticism in these works that complements their traditional assessment as documentation of the cultural history of Liberalism in this period.