Wide-ranging survey of the criticism devoted to Theodor Fontane, with particular emphasis on more recent theoretical trends. This study of the literary scholarship on Fontane's narrative works is the first to present a systematic review of the ever-growing body of criticism on Germany's major realist novelist. Significant developments in Fontane criticism are traced in historical context, from their beginnings in contemporary commentary to the present day. The author places special emphasis on scholarship since 1980, analysing the influence of new literary critical trends in this period; she also considers the effect upon traditional literary criticism of feminism, psychoanalysis, and comparatist approaches, and the fresh developments in reception history, translation, and media studies.

On the centenary of Fontane’s death and at the turn of the century these essays take a new look at this supreme chronicler of Prussia and of the Germany that emerges after 1871. Written by scholars from different countries and disciplines, they focus on novels and theatre reviews from the perspectives of philosophy, sociology, comparative literature and translation theory, and in the contexts of topography and painting. Connections and crosscurrents emerge to reveal new aspects of Fontane’s poetics and to produce contrasting but complementary readings of his novels. He appears in the company of predecessors and contemporaries, such as Scott, Thackeray, Saar, Ibsen, Turgenev, but also in that of writers he has rarely, if ever, been seen beside, such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Stendhal, Trollope, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Beckett and Faulkner. The historical novel and the social position of women are each a recurring focus of interest. Fontane emerges as receptive to other voices, as a precursor of developments in modern narrative, and confirmed as the novelist who brings the nineteenth-century German novel closest to the broad traditions of European realism.

"The first English translation of Fontane's late, posthumously published novel, featuring the eponymous, complex heroine and confronting issues regarding gender roles and marriage that still resonate today. Theodor Fontane hesitated to publish his late novel Mathilde Mèohring because he believed it was too modern for his readership. Published posthumously in 1906, its themes - corrosive economic precarity, the ambivalence of marriage for women, and the burden of work expectations for men - resonate uncannily with readers today. The heroine Mathilde and her mother cling to the underside of the lower middle class by renting out a room in their small Berlin apartment. Their new tenant seems to offer a path to middle-class security, so although marriage is not her first choice, Mathilde applies her shrewd yet limited understanding of class mores to pursue it - with results both triumphant and catastrophic. The last among Fontane's powerfully drawn female protagonists, Mathilde is unlike any previous heroine of a German novel: intelligent and energetic but plain and deeply pragmatic. We follow the flawed but fearless Mathilde from the bustling metropolis of Berlin to Woldenstein, a sleepy backwater town she single-handedly transforms, and back. Unknown in the English-speaking world, this compact work has the humor and pathos familiar to readers of Fontane, and is powerfully evocative of the politics of class, gender, and religion in late 19th-century Germany. Also included are an introduction, an afterword, and extensive endnotes that richly contextualize the work for both general readers and students of literature, history, gender studies, and German studies"--

The history of this period in German literature is told through a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, a comprehensive bibliography, and over 200 cross-referenced dictionary entries on poetry, novels, historical narrative, philosophical musings, drama, and the exceptional writers who emerged and shaped German literature over the centuries.

The three concepts mentioned in the title of this volume imply the contact between two or more literary phenomena; they are based on similarities that are related to a form of ‘travelling’ and imitation or adaptation of entire texts, genres, forms or contents. Transfer comprises all sorts of ‘travelling’, with translation as a major instrument of transferring literature across linguistic and cultural barriers. Transfer aims at the process of communication, starting with the source product and its cultural context and then highlighting the mediation by certain agents and institutions to end up with inclusion in the target culture. Reception lays its focus on the receiving culture, especially on critcism, reading, and interpretation. Translation, therefore, forms a major factor in reception with the general aim of reception studies being to reveal the wide spectrum of interpretations each text offers. Moreover, translations are the prime instrument in the distribution of literature across linguistic and cultural borders; thus, they pave the way for gaining prestige in the world of literature. The thirty-eight papers included in this volume and dedicated to research in this area were previously read at the ICLA conference 2016 in Vienna. They are ample proof that the field remains at the center of interest in Comparative Literature.

Using Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's seminal work on the dialectical nature of the Enlightenment as a framework, Youngman makes the original claim that realist authors are a particularly rich source in which to study the intersection of technology and mythology.

Kathryn Ambrose offers a new approach to the Woman Question in mid- to late-nineteenth-century English, German and Russian literature. Using a methodological framework based on feminist theory and post-structuralism, she provides a re-vision of canonical texts (such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Effi Briest, Fathers and Children and Anna Karenina) alongside lesser-known works by Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. Her exploration of the semiotics of barriers – as opposed to the established approach of the semiotics of space – makes for a rewarding reading of this period of literature and establishes new cross-cultural and literary connections between the three countries.