The wanderer in nineteeth-century German literature : intellectual history and cultural criticism / Andrew Cusack.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cusack, Andrew, 1969-

Series:

Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered)

Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

German literature--19th century--History and criticism.

German literature.

Nomads in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 257 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Wanderer in nineteenth-century German literature

Wanderer in 19th-century German literature

Place of Publication:

Rochester, N.Y. : Camden House, 2008.

Summary:

The wanderer is an indispensable component of the German cultural imaginary. A semantic building-block with a highly iconic quality, the range of the motif extends beyond literature and into the spheres of music and the visual arts. Its prominence in the nineteenth century owes much to the willingness of the intellectual pioneers of that age to regard themselves as wanderers. The motif is also a key to the 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. The writers discussed in this book-from Goethe, Heine, and Buchner, to Fontane, Raabe, Gotthelf, and Holtei-were keenly aware of the motif's interpretive value, and attempted to grasp with it not only such developments as mass migration and disappearing institutions but also unprecedented opportunities for artistic and scientific innovation.

Using a method based on New Historicism, but with added emphasis on literature as cultural commentary, Andrew Cusack's study traces the motif's intertextual connections, how it receives meaning from non-literary discourses, and how it transmits meaning into the social sphere by molding individual and collective self-conceptions. The study draws on a corpus of ten prose narratives that reflect the vast scope of the motif and show how its function changes: canonical works such as Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels, Heine's Harzreise, and Buchner's Lenz, underresearched works by Fontane and Raabe, and neglected works such as Gotthelf's Jakobs Wanderungen and Holtei's Die Vagabunden. The study 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 into the latter part of the century.

Contents:

The wanderer as the subject of education

The wanderer in the romantic imagination

The wanderer in political discourse

Wandering at the margins: journeymen and vagabonds.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [233]-249) and index.

ISBN:

9781571133861

1571133860

OCLC:

212908986