Emergence of the Modern German Novel : Christoph Martin Wieland, Sophie von la Roche, and Maria Anna Sagar

by Baldwin, Claire

• ISBN13: 9781571131676
• ISBN10: 1571131671
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-05-01
• Publisher: Camden House

Summary

This book treats both the literary history of the modern German novel and theoretical considerations about gender and 18th-century narrative strategies. It attempts to overcome a two-fold division in scholarship by treating Christoph Martin Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon and Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Fr+uleins von Sternheim, the two novels generally considered to be foundational in the development of the German Bildungsroman, in conjunction, rather than as examples of unrelated traditions, and by considering the reciprocal influence of fictional and theoretical writing dealing with the developing genre of the modern German novel. Baldwin also examines Wieland's Don Sylvio and Maria Anna Sagar's Karolinens Tagebuch and analyzes how gender as a relative construct functions in each of the four texts. In so doing she shows how the new German novel of the 1770s aligns reading and narrative practices with gendered attributes to establish narrative authority and cultural legitimacy for the new stories of identity they explore. The interpretations proceed from an analysis of the ways that reading and narration are represented in the novels, and in their poetological prefaces, to show that the texts take up, challenge, and contribute to contemporary literary and social theories of the novel.Claire Baldwin is assistant professor of German at Colgate Unversity in Hamilton, New York.

Author Biography

Claire Baldwin is assistant professor of German at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The Powers of Desire: The Debate on the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Germany	p. 13
Theoretical Discourse on the Novel	p. 14
Images of Readers and Their Desires	p. 26
Anthropology, Literature, Gender	p. 29
The Pleasures of Fiction: Christoph Martin Wieland's Der Sieg der Natur uber die Schwarmerey oder Die Abentheuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva	p. 38
The Demands of Reading: a Satirical Preface	p. 41
The Female Quixote: Donna Mencia as Adversary of the Narrative	p. 46
Symbolic Siblings	p. 53
Hyacinthe's Tales of Virtue	p. 54
Don Sylvio's Tales of Enchantment	p. 58
Little Pedro's Old Wives' Tales	p. 62
Narrative Reliability: "Biribinker"	p. 70
Seductive Strategies and the Promise of Knowledge: Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon	p. 73
Seductive Arts: Agathon's Aesthetic Education	p. 77
Danae's Autobiographical Tale: A Model Poetic Narrative	p. 85
Telling Tales of Virtue	p. 93
A Story of Her Own: Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim	p. 103
Wieland's Preface	p. 105
The Female Editor	p. 112
Virtue Rewarded or Virtue Betrayed?	p. 113
"A New Genre of Character"	p. 121
Compiling Sternheim's Story	p. 128
The Legitimation of Desire	p. 137
Narrating Nothing: Maria Anna Sagar's Karolinens Tagebuch ohne ausserordentliche Handlungen, oder gerade so viel als gar keine	p. 141
Defining the "Nothing" of the Novel	p. 143
The Writing Heroine Karoline	p. 146
Stories of Silence: The Adventures of Eleonora Lusani	p. 150
"The History of the Duchess v. ***"	p. 155
Karoline's Authorial Profiles	p. 160
Karoline's Conflicting Plots of Authorship and Marriage	p. 167
Disclosing the Fiction of Marriage as Closure	p. 169
Epilogue: Caveat Lector	p. 176
Works Consulted	p. 181
Notes	p. 207
Index	p. 253
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