Wanderer in Nineteenth-Century German Literature
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19th-century
A01=Andrew Cusack
artistic innovation
Author_Andrew Cusack
Category=DSBF
Category=DSC
cultural criticism
cultural memory
Enlightenment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
German literature
intellectual history
literary pioneers
mass migration
Romanticism
scientific innovation
social commentary
wanderer motif
Product details
- ISBN 9781571133861
- Weight: 534g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Aug 2008
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Pathbreaking examination of the prominent 19th-c. motif with an eye toward literature as social commentary.
The wanderer is an indispensable part of the German cultural imaginary. The nineteenth-century prominence of the motif owes much to the self-conception of the intellectual pioneers of the day as wanderers. The motif is also a keyto interpretation of the social and cultural phenomena of a turbulent century that began with the emancipatory claims of the Enlightenment and ended in untrammeled industrialism. Writers from Goethe to Büchner, Fontane to Holtei were keenly aware of the motif's interpretive value, attempting to grasp with it not only such developments as mass migration and disappearing institutions but also unprecedented opportunities for artistic and scientific innovation. This book re-interprets canonical works such as Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels, Heine's Harzreise, and Büchner's Lenz, examines underresearched works by Fontane and Raabe, and charts new territory with readings of works by Gotthelf and Holtei -- a selection of texts that reveals the vast scope and changing function of the wanderer motif. Andrew Cusack pays scrupulous attention to the historical specificity of each work and to its relationship to contemporary aesthetic and philosophical currents, revealing the wanderer motif to be a significant vehicle of cultural memory that sustained the ideas of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism.
Andrew Cusack is a Lecturer in the Department of Germanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin.
ANDREW CUSACK is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews, UK
